FESTIVAL OF CONTE AUGUST 4th - 9th 1990 j:*sT?\€^ S& EDITION PETERS -&B) t*v^v- iT^^ RECENT ADDITIONS TO OUR CONTEMPORARY MUSIC CATALOGUE P66438a John Becker Concerto for Violin and Orchestra. $20.00 Violin and Piano (Edited by Gregory Fulkerson) P67233 Martin Boykan String Quartet no. 3 $40.00 (Score and Parts) (1988 Walter Hinrichsen Award) P66832 George Crumb Apparition $20.00 Elegiac Songs and Vocalises for Soprano and Amplified Piano P67261 Roger Reynolds Whispers Out of Time $35.00 String Orchestra (Score)* (1989 Pulitzer Prize) P67283 Bruce J. Taub Of the Wing of Madness $30.00 Chamber Orchestra (Score)* P67273 Chinary Ung Spiral $15.00 Vc, Pf and Perc (Score) (1989 Grawemeyer and Friedheim Award) P66532 Charles Wuorinen The Blue Bamboula $15.00 Piano Solo * Performance materials availablefrom our rental department C.F. PETERS CORPORATION ^373 Park Avenue So./New York, NY 10016/Phone (212) 686-4l47/Fax (212) 689-9412 1990 FESTIVAL OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC Oliver Knussen, Festival Coordinator by the sponsored TanglewGDd TANGLEWOOD MUSIC CENTER Music Leon Fleisher, Artistic Director Center Gilbert Kalish, Chairman of the Faculty Lukas Foss, Composer-in-Residence Oliver Knussen, Coordinator of Contemporary Music Activities Bradley Lubman, Assistant to Oliver Knussen Richard Ortner, Administrator Barbara Logue, Assistant to Richard Ortner James E. Whitaker, Chief Coordinator Carol Wood worth, Secretary to the Faculty Harry Shapiro, Orchestra Manager Works presented at this year's Festival were prepared under the guidance of the following Tanglewood Music Center Faculty: Frank Epstein Donald MacCourt Norman Fischer John Oliver Gilbert Kalish Peter Serkin Oliver Knussen Joel Smirnoff loel Krosnick Yehudi Wyner 1990 Visiting Composer/Teachers Elliott Carter John Harbison Tod Machover Donald Martino George Perle Steven Stucky The 1990 Festival of Contemporary Music is supported by a gift from Dr. Raymond and Hannah H. Schneider. The Tanglewood Music Center is maintained for advanced study in music and sponsored by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Seiji Ozawa, Music Director Kenneth Haas, Managing Director Daniel R. Gustin, Manager of Tanglewood Tanglewood Music Center Opening Exercises in the late 1940s: among those pictured are (seat- ed at extreme left) Alfred Zighera and Louis Speyer; (front bench, from left) Lukas Foss, TMC Dean Ralph Berkowitz, Aaron Copland, Serge Koussevitzky, William Kroll, Hugh Ross, Zvi Zeitlin; Sarah Caldwell (seated just behind Koussevitzky and Kroll); and Felix Wolfus (behind Kroll and Ross). 1990 Festival of Contemporary Music: A Personal Introduction Even in a world of ever more encroach- poser" Lukas Foss as Composer-in-Resi- ing conservatism a festival of contempo- dence for a second consecutive season, rary music and a fiftieth anniversary retro- and to register our gratitude for his refresh- spective should, by definition, be mutually ingly unorthodox and always thought-pro- exclusive even if one stretches "contempo- voking musicality, which has stimulated rary" to include the recent past. (Perhaps all of us here in one or other of his multifari- this is the place to remind ourselves that a ous roles. mere decade from now the phrase "twen- The performance of Bruno Maderna's tieth century music" will have a quite other Giardino Religioso will have a real poi- resonance to it.) Nonetheless, ideological gnance for those who, like myself, came stances aside, that is precisely what this into contact with him here in the early particular Festival is. As a result, our con- 1970s, shortly before his shockingly early cern to make its selective reflection of a death. His personal charm was such that continuum of new music at Tanglewood one scarcely noticed how much wisdom over fifty years not too backward-looking he communicated in his teaching and re- or laurel-resting has led, paradoxically, to hearsal methods, and no musician can a higher concentration of music from the have been more discussed and missed by decade just past than hitherto. his colleagues to this day. I would also like Our opening concert, for instance, to mention here Hans Werner Henze's new which honors some notable Tanglewood Introitus: Requiem for piano and chamber Fellows of the 1940s and '50s, commences orchestra, the first section of a projected with a late and little-known fanfare by evening-long work-in-progress. This is a Aaron Copland (who was the subject of a very brief but highly charged and expres- major retrospective here last summer) and sive tribute to Michael Vyner, the longtime proceeds with some highly characteristic Artistic Director of the London Sinfonietta examples of Messrs. Berio, Crumb, who died last October at 46. He was a Druckman, and Foss's work from the close friend and supporter of both Henze 1980s. The following day's events focus on and myself, and no one of his generation some notable residents during the long did more for the promotion and perform- tenure of Gunther Schuller, and a substan- ance of new music that I know of. I am tial recent work of his own will be heard most grateful to Mr. Henze for allowing us under the direction of the present Artistic to unveil this fragment in the USA, both as Director Leon Fleisher. On Tuesday and a personal "thank you" to Michael and an Thursday the spotlight turns onto recent acknowledgment of the close ties that have developments in the contemporary music formed between Hans Werner Henze and wing of the TMC, with works by young the TMC in recent years. composers from Argentina, China, and I have the unsettling feeling that this is Germany as well as closer to home, and becoming a rather elegiac picture of a Festi- culminating in the premiere of White Heat val. Perhaps "nostalgic" is more appro- by Randall Woolf, the recipient of this priate: a few weeks ago, one of the com- year's Paul Jacobs Memorial Commission. poser Fellows remarked about Lukas Foss's Beyond these simple chronological con- Baroque Variations that in a sense Lukas cerns, it is our hope that the resulting pro- had unwittingly invented post-modernism grams are their own justification, but in this work. Whatever the truth of that, it is perhaps a few personal observations are in certainly no coincidence that also lurking order here and there. in these programs is a layer of music about Firstly, it is a special pleasure to wel- other music, whether Harbison on come back the original "Tanglewood Com- Schubert, Glanert on Mahler, or Martino's mysterious Schonberg cabaret. And de- spite the Tanglewood-retrospectiveness of the season, I could not resist programming non-alumnus Robin Holloway's lovingly outrageous Parsifal waltzes close to alum- nus Fred Lerdahl's Waltzes. One big thing that composers like Berio, Foss, and Maderna have taught younger generations by example is that it is still possible for serious, literate music to make us smile. It is worth bearing in mind that the Festi- val of Contemporary Music has a double function: as well as being designed to in- form and entertain our audiences, it also attempts to give the young players who come here as much experience in different technical and musical challenges as our necessarily limited time will allow. So the continuing inclusion of "contemporary classics" such as Stravinsky, Wolpe, and Carter in our programs should be seen in this light rather than the retrospective one. But it is very exciting for us to have been partly involved in the evolution of Elliott Carter's Three Occasions for Orchestra via the second movement, Remembrance, which was premiered here in 1988, and a real treat to be able to present a rare per- formance of Stravinsky's late and certainly entertaining problem-child The Flood, written for television in 1962 and perhaps now ripe for reassessment as the master- piece some of us feel it always has been. It remains to thank Peter Serkin, Tod Machover, and Marimolin for so enriching the scope of this Festival; Leon Fleisher, Gilbert Kalish, and the other members of the Faculty who have worked so hard in the preparation of these performances; Dan Gustin, Richard Ortner, and the inde- fatigable James Whitaker and Carol Wood- worth for making it all possible once again. —Oliver Knussen Coordinator of Contemporary Music Activities, Tanglewood Music Center July 28, 1990 1990 Festival of Contemporary Music: Electro-Acoustic Preludes In the three summers that I have or- indicating Berio's uncanny sense of posing ganized Tanglewood's series of Electro- many musical problems that remain chal- Acoustic Preludes, I have attempted to con- lenging to the present day. vey an overall sense of the diversity and The compositions presented this season vitality of the electronic music field today. fall into three major categories in terms of In 1988, the programs were chosen to em- the way that musical material is treated in phasize the appropriation of commercially an electronic context. The first category is available personal computers and digital the integration of "non-musical" sounds music technology by serious composers, into a musical discourse by electronic highlighting the movement of electronic means. Berio's Omaggio a Joyce is one of music from specialized research centers the earliest and most famous examples of towards the musical mainstream. In 1989, this tendency. As Berio pointed out in his pieces were selected that used the com- 1958 essay "Poesia e Musica— un'es- puter not just for the production of new perienza": "We often seem to discover sounds, but as aids — and even surro- more 'poetry' in prose than in poetry itself gates — to the compositional process itself, and more 'music' in speech than in agreed- thus raising many issues about the prom- upon musical sounds." For Berio, this ises and limits of machine "intelligence" meant proposing a new relationship be- and creativity.