PROGRAM NOTES

MUSICNOW: MYRA MELFORD AND JOHN ZORN

Marc Mellits OCTET (2010) Duration: 14 minutes Instrumentation: String Octet Commissioned by the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra Premiered by the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra String Quartet & the Syracuse Symphony Youth Orchestra String Quartet on March 14 2010 at the John H. Mulroy Civic Center in Syracuse, New York Copyright/Publisher: Dacia Music

The composer writes: “I composed my Octet during the winter of 2009-10. The majority of the music was written at the Banff Music Center, where I was invited to be an artist-in-residence in January 2010. The incredibly beautiful mountainous surroundings of the Banff Centre had a profound impact on me. My composing studio overlooked the Canadian Rockies, pristine and covered with snow and ice. The weather was brutal, with a level of cold I had never felt. This, juxtaposed with the astounding frozen beauty all around me, provided the inspiration for the music. My studio had a glorious enormous picture window that overlooked the Rockies. The music came quick and it came easy; before I knew it I had material for all four movements. The outer movements are aggressive and have the biting cold I felt, while the second and third movements reflect more of the warmth I felt inside, sharing my thoughts with a wide range of artists who were also in residence.”

About the composer: Composer Marc Mellits is one of the leading American composers of his generation, enjoying hundreds of performances throughout the world every year, making him one of the most performed composers in the United States. From Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center, to prestigious music festivals in Europe and the US, Mellits’ music is a constant mainstay on programs throughout the world. His unique musical style is an eclectic combination of driving rhythms, soaring lyricism, and colorful orchestrations that all combine to communicate directly with the listener. Mellits’ music is often described as being visceral, making a deep connection with the audience. He started composing very early, and was writing piano music long before he started formal piano lessons at age 6. He went on to study at the Eastman School of Music, Yale School of Music, Cornell University, and Tanglewood. Mellits often is a miniaturist, composing works that are comprised of short, contrasting movements or sections. His music is eclectic, all encompassing, colorful, and always has a sense of forward motion. Mellits’ music has been played by major ensembles across the globe and he has been commissioned by groups such as the Kronos Quartet, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Duo Assad, Bang On A Can All-Stars, Eliot Fisk, Canadian Brass, Nexus Percussion, Debussy Quartet, Real Quiet, New Music Detroit, Four-In-Correspondence (National Symphony Orchestra), Musique En Roue Libre (France), Fiarì Ensemble (Italy), Percussions Claviers de Lyon (France), Third Coast Percussion, Talujon, the Society for New Music, Syracuse Symphony Orchestra, and the Albany Symphony's Dog’s Of Desire. Additionally, Mellits’ music has been performed, toured, and/or recorded by members of the Detroit Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Minneapolis Symphony, Brooklyn Philharmonic, eighth blackbird, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, New Millennium Ensemble, Da Capo Chamber Players, and the American Modern Ensemble, among many others. On film, Mellits has composed numerous scores, including the PBS mini-series Beyond The Light Switch, which won a 2012 Dupont-Columbia award, the most prestigious award in documentaries. Mellits also directs and plays keyboards in his own unique ensemble, the Mellits Consort. He was awarded the prestigious 2004 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award. On CD, there are over 50 recorded works of Mellits’ music that can be found on Black Box, Endeavour Classics, Cantaloupe, CRI/Emergency Music, Santa Fe New Music, Innova, and Dacia Music. Marc Mellits is on the music faculty of the University of Illinois at Chicago where he teaches Composition. He lives in Chicago with his wife and two daughters, and spends significant time in Romania.

Esa-Pekka Salonen DICHOTOMIE (2000) Duration: 10 minutes (Extract: Movement 1) Instrumentation: Solo Piano Premiered by Gloria Cheng on December 4 2000 as part of the Green Umbrella Series at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, California Copyright/Publisher: Chester Music Ltd

The composer writes: “Dichotomie was originally intended to become a short encore-type of piece. I wanted to write a surprise new work for Gloria Cheng for a concert dedicated to my music in Los Angeles in January 2000. I soon realized, that the material I had invented had a tendency to grow into two very different kinds of music. It became obvious that this was going to be a longer piece in two movements, as the material seemed to have that sort of genetic code. I missed my deadline for the January concert, and kept working during the early months of the year 2000. I put the piece aside for the summer, and finally completed it in October of the same year. The first movement, Mécanisme, is indeed like a machine, but not a perfect one: more like one of the Tinguely sculptures (or mobiles, they really defy all attempts to categorize them), which are very active, extroverted and expressive, but produce nothing concrete. I imagined a machine that could feel some sort of joie de vivre, and in that process, i.e. becoming human, would loose its cold precision. Organisme, the second movement, behaves very differently. Again, the music is busy on the surface, but breathes a lot slower and deeper. The music is completely continuous; all different sections grow into each other organically. A metaphor I had in mind was indeed a tree, not a huge one, more like a slender willow that moves gracefully in the wind but returns always to its original shape and position.”

About the composer: A lauded composer and conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen has a restless innovation that marks him as one of the most important artists in classical music. Salonen is currently the Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor of the Philharmonia Orchestra and Conductor Laureate for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he was Music Director from 1992 until 2009. The 2014/15 season finds him as the first-ever Creative Chair at the Tonhalle Zurich Orchestra. Salonen opened the 2014/15 season with a performance of Berlioz’s Requiem with the Philharmonia Orchestra, tours extensively in Europe and Japan with the Philharmonia, and leads the City of Light: Paris 1900-1950 series as the thematic focus of the season. Throughout their relationship, Salonen and the Philharmonia have curated landmark multi-disciplinary projects, such as the award- winning RE- RITE and Universe of Sound installations, which allow members of the public to conduct, play, and step inside the Philharmonia Orchestra with Salonen through audio and video projections. Salonen also drove the development of a much-hailed app for iPad, The Orchestra, which allows the user unprecedented access to the internal workings of eight symphonic works. This season, Salonen will also make guest appearances with the Bavarian and Finnish radio symphony orchestras, Orchestre de Paris, New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, among others. Salonen composes works that move freely between contemporary idioms, combining intricacy and technical virtuosity with playful rhythmic and melodic innovations. Salonen has written several pieces for symphony orchestra, including Foreign Bodies (2001), Insomnia (2002), Wing on Wing (2004), and Nyx (2011), as well as two concertos: the first in 2007 for pianist Yefim Bronfman and the second in 2009 for violinist Leila Josefowicz. The latter was awarded the prestigious Grawemeyer Award and was featured in a 2014 international Apple ad campaign for iPad. In September 2014, the Tonhalle Zurich Orchestra premiered Karawane, Salonen's large-scale work for orchestra and chorus, to great acclaim. Esa-Pekka Salonen's extensive recording career includes a disc of his orchestral works performed by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, which he also conducted, as well as one of his Piano Concerto and his works Helix and Dichotomie. An album of Henri Dutilleux’s Correspondances, recorded with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France in the presence of the composer, was released in 2013 on Deutsche Grammophon on the composer’s 97th birthday. In 2012 Salonen recorded Saariaho’s Passion De Simone with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Dawn Upshaw. That year also saw the release of the first-ever recording of Shostakovich's previously undiscovered opera prologue, Orango, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the release of Out of Nowhere, featuring Leila Josefowicz and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra performing Salonen's Violin Concerto and Nyx. He recently completed a 30-year project with the Los Angeles Philharmonic to record all four symphonies of his friend and mentor, Witold Lutosławski.

John Zorn GOETIA (2002) Duration: 9 minutes (Extract: Movements 1, 3, 4, 5, 8) Instrumentation: Solo Violin Premiered by Jennifer Choi on March 2 2003 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, New York Copyright/Publisher: John Zorn/Musical Optics

The composer writes: “From Paganini thru Stravinsky and beyond composers and audiences alike have felt a mysterious alliance between the violin and the devil. This unholy alliance is explored and expounded upon in this set of eight incantations/variations for solo violin. Goetia is a tradition of black magic that incorporates spells, incantations and ceremonies for the calling forth, conjuration and summoning of demonic spirits to visible appearance with the intent of compelling them to perform acts under the magician’s will. Highly ceremonial in nature, Goetic magick demands the strictest observance of a multitude of details, outlined in a series of mediaeval grimoires such as the Lemegeton of Solomon the King or the Steganographia of Trithemius. In keeping with the meticulous and ascetic nature of these processes, Goetia was composed under an equally rigorous formal model, taking the form of eight short movements (incantations) each employing the same sequence of 277 pitches. The idea of variations are realized through rhythmic, dynamic and coloristic changes that transform this set of notes into eight distinctly different sonic études—one movement using quadruple stops, one sempre pizzicato, one perpetuum mobile, one con sordino, etc. The piece was completed befittingly at midnight, Halloween night 2002.”

About the composer: Born and raised in New York City, composer/performer John Zorn has been a central figure in the Downtown Scene since 1975, incorporating a wide variety of creative musicians into various compositional formats. His work is remarkably diverse and draws inspiration from art, literature, film, theatre, philosophy, alchemy and mysticism as well as music. He founded the Tzadik label in 1995, runs the East Village performance space The Stone and has edited and published seven volumes of musician’s writings under the title ARCANA.

Myra Melford THE LARGE ENDS THE WAY (1995) Duration: 13 minutes Instrumentation: Jazz Octet Premiered Myra Melford’s The Same River Twice in 1995 at Roulette Intermedium in New York, New York. Copyright/Publisher: Sun on the Sound Publishing, BMI

THE WHOLE TREE GONE (2006) Duration: 5 minutes Instrumentation: Jazz Octet Commissioned by Chamber Music America’s New Works Presentation Premiered by Myra Melford’s Be Bread Sextet in October 2006 at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, CA Copyright/Publisher: Sun on the Sound Publishing, BMI

The composer writes: “The Large Ends the Way was composed for my quintet, The Same River Twice, and was an attempt to synthesize much of what I was thinking about at the time. I was fascinated by the philosophy of Heraclitus and was working with several of his aphorisms as guides for composition such as (I paraphrase here) ‘the hidden harmony is better than the obvious one,’ or ‘you can’t step twice into the same river…’, which seemed apt for music written for improvisers. While providing a substantial amount of notated material, I still leave much room for the performers’ own expression. This piece was inspired by two additional extra- musical ideas: the elegance, simplicity and overwhelming power of the Viet Nam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington, DC and Book of the Tiger by Kiichi Hogen (c. 1200), a Japanese martial artist, from which the title comes—I was a student of aikido and Zen at the time, and attempting to express the feeling of being centered in both movement and stillness. The Whole Tree Gone was written ten years later for my sextet, Be Bread. The title comes from a poem by Rumi, the 12th century Sufi mystic, and is a metaphor for the power of devotion and practice (fire) to destroy the ego or worldly concerns (the tree) and bring one into the ecstasy of union with the Beloved; the experience of a sudden, violent, perhaps painful, destruction leading to clarity of vision and a sense of well-being. Again, much of the music, though through-composed, opens up for moments of improvised play by different voices within the ensemble.”

About the composer: For pianist, composer and Guggenheim fellow Myra Melford, the personal and the poetic have always been intimately and deeply connected. Raised outside Chicago in a house designed by the renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Melford grew up literally surrounded by art. Where most of us find the beauty in our childhood homes through the memories and associations we make within its four walls, Melford saw early on that aesthetic expression could both be built from and be a structure for profound emotions. Over the course of a career spanning more than two decades, Melford has taken that lesson to heart, crafting a singular sound world that harmonizes the intricate and the expressive, the meditative and the assertive, the cerebral and the playful. Drawing inspiration from a vast spectrum of cultural and spiritual traditions and artistic disciplines, she has found a “spark of recognition” in sources as diverse as the writings of the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi and the Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano; the wisdom of Zen Buddhism and the Huichol Indians of Mexico; and the music of mentors like Jaki Byard, Don Pullen, and Henry Threadgill. The latest incarnation of this ever-evolving cross-disciplinary dialogue is Language of Dreams, which will premiere in November 2013 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The multi-media work is inspired by Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy, a history of the Americas told through indigenous myths and the accounts of European colonizers. The piece will combine music for Melford’s quintet Snowy Egret with narration by a multi-lingual actor, dance by Los Angeles-based choreographer Oguri, and video by Bay Area filmmaker David Szlasa. While Language of Dreams is her most ambitious project to date, it is not the first time that Melford has constructed a piece from such a wealth of disciplines. In 2006, the Walker Arts Center premiered Knock on the Sky, a piece inspired by Albert Camus’ essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” and Kobo Abe’s novel Woman in the Dunes, in which Melford collaborated with New York City–based choreographer/dancer Dawn Akemi Saito and Austrian architect Michael Haberz. Snowy Egret, Melford’s latest working group, made its debut in 2012. The quintet comprises some of creative music’s most inventive and individual voices: trumpeter Ron Miles, guitarist Liberty Ellman, bassist Stomu Takeishi, and drummer Tyshawn Sorey. Melford’s spacious, contemplative, exploratory compositions have long attracted and almost demanded such forward-thinking artists. Her past ensembles have included Be Bread, with Cuong Vu, Ben Goldberg, Brandon Ross, Stomu Takeishi, and Matt Wilson; The Same River, Twice, with Dave Douglas, Chris Speed, Erik Friedlander, and Michael Sarin; Crush, with Takeishi, Vu, and Kenny Wolleson. Melford also currently is one-third of the collective Trio M with bassist Mark Dresser and drummer Matt Wilson; their most recent CD, The Guest House, was one of 2012’s most acclaimed releases. She also performs in the duo ::Dialogue:: with clarinetist Ben Goldberg and will release her first solo album in October 2013, a collection of work inspired by the paintings of the late visual artist Don Reich. Melford’s musical evolution has long run in parallel with her spiritual search, a personal journey that has led her to Aikido, Siddha Yoga, and the wisdom traditions of the Huichol people of Mexico’s central highlands. Sonically, that quest is expressed via her wide-ranging palette, which expands from the piano to the harmonium and electronic keyboards or to amplifying barely audible sounds in the piano’s interior. Her playing can build from the blissful and lyrical to the intense and angular, with accents from Indian, African, Cuban and Middle Eastern musics or the cerebral abstraction of European and American jazz and classical experimentalism. While Melford’s music continually reaches toward a state of transcendence, it still remains deeply rooted in the blues traditions she heard growing up in the Chicago area. In 1978, she first encountered violinist Leroy Jenkins, her introduction to the AACM, whose boundary-free, adventurous approach to jazz remains an influence. She would go on to study with Jenkins, together forming the collective trio Equal Interest with multi­reedist Joseph Jarman in 1997. Melford moved to the east coast in 1982 and began performing in New York City’s thriving Downtown scene, making her recorded debut as a leader in 1990; she has since released more than twenty albums as a leader or co-leader and appeared on more than 40 releases as a side-person. In 2000, she spent a year in North India on a Fulbright scholarship, immersing herself in the region’s classical, devotional, and folk music. Melford relocated to the west coast in 2004, joining the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley as an associate professor of contemporary improvised music. There, she engages students in the theory and practice of improvisation, employing diverse creative strategies. Her work has earned Melford some of the highest accolades in her field. In 2013 alone, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow and received the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s Performing Artist Award and a Doris Duke Residency to Build Demand for the Arts for her efforts to re-imagine the jazz program at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She was also the winner of the 2012 Alpert Award in the Arts for Music. She has been honored numerous times in DownBeat’s Critics Poll since 1991 and was nominated by the Jazz Journalists Association as Pianist of the Year in 2008 and 2009 and Composer of the Year in 2004.

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