Andrew Waggoner Terror and Memory ImprovIsatIons thIrd strIng Quartet exorcIst LIvre Inventory of terrors one KIndness www.albanyrecords.com TROY1307 albany records u.s. 915 broadway, albany, ny 12207 tel: 518.436.8814 fax: 518.436.0643 albany records u.k. open end | corIgliano Quartet | FlexIbLe musIc | ensembLe nordLys box 137, kendal, cumbria la8 0xd tel: 01539 824008 caroline stInson, cello | molly morKoski, pIano © 2011 albany records made in the usa ddd waRning: cOpyrighT subsisTs in all Recordings issued undeR This label. like the first it wants, needs transcendence, and occasionally finds it. Cast as a large The Music set of free variations, it finally settles into its expressive core, the particular voice for Terror and Memory: five recent pieces that grew somehow out of the narrow space which is provided by the Wallflowers’ tune, Sixth Avenue Heartache. At that point in which experience is transformed into history. Time, memory, the spell of love and the piece’s dual nature finds its center. the long-sounding echoes of terror inform each of these works which, while stylisti- Exorcist was co-commissioned in 2006 by Flexible Music and the Society for cally varied, share a common set of musical and emotional concerns. Actually, even New Music, with a grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. The score is the stylistic differences seem to me somehow of a piece: it seems to me that if one prefaced with three quotes: combined Livre with Inventory of Terrors one would end up with something very much like One Kindness. Merrin embarked upon a lengthy prayer and Karras again returned his Bookending these pieces are two group improvisations by Open End. We wanted gaze to the bed, to his hopes of his God and the supernatural hovering to include them because improvisation is central to what we do as a group, and I low in the empty air. An elation thrilled up through his being. It’s there! like very much how they frame and comment on the works they enclose. They were There it is! Right in front of me! There! done with no planning, one take each, no net. —William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist The first composed work on the program, my Third String Quartet, was commis- sioned by Dickenson College for the Corigliano Quartet, and was composed between It is just because of this inner connection with the black side of things the summer of 2001 and the winter of ‘02. Like much of my music, the work that it is so easy for the mass man to commit the most appalling crimes moves between public and very private expressive worlds, seeking to understand without thinking. Only ruthless self-knowledge on the widest scale, which and mediate the space between them. Chamber music is always described as an sees good and evil in correct perspective and can weigh up the motives essentially personal medium, and so it can be difficult in a quartet to know just how of human action, offers some guarantee that the end result will not turn to distinguish between public and private discourse when the whole experience is so out too badly. intimate. In this piece it feels to me as if both are always engaged, the one speaking —Carl Jung, Aion through the other; it’s the surface persona of the work that shifts over time. Thus the first movement is all personal, individual joy, ecstasy even, expressed through a mask of extrovert, public ebullience. The second, and much larger, movement responds to the things of the world, to collective, shared tragedy, through a voice of private lament and reflection. That’s not to say that the second is entirely a downer: We are asked often by the young who our “torturers” were, of what cloth by a desire to make sense of some very dark history, both personal and collective, they were made. The term “torturers” alludes to our guardians, the SS, in musical terms. Each of these works has presented me with a particular expres- and is in my opinion inappropriate: it brings to mind twisted individuals, sive and technical problem to be solved, an aesthetic challenge, since it’s easy to ill-born, sadists, afflicted by an original flaw. Instead, they were made of “go dark,” but hard to do so in a way that isn’t either obvious, or alienating, or the same cloth as we. simplistically deep (the first time I saw my name on the web it was in the con- —Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved text of a goth site that had chosen my first string quartet as one of the best goth releases of the year. Flattering, yet sobering...). Inventory... is just that: an ordered Taken together these provide a snapshot of the inner world of my piece, one collection, a survey, of varied emotional responses to a range of terrors; the agents driven by a very personal desire to understand the nature of evil, its source, and its themselves, the ghosts, devils, oppressors, sociopaths and obsessive, self-generated amplification from individual weakness into collective horror. The piece follows its fears, remain out of sight, out of earshot. The movement titles are important to me, opening gestures through a set of variations that descend through a surface veneer but should serve only as glyphs for the listener, indeterminate guides to multiple of attractive material into something darker, stranger, more disquieting; one recog- possible hearings. The shapes are simple, but hopefully arresting, unanticipated, nizes eventually that the attractive materials and their grotesque shadows are one “other.” Inventory of Terrors was commissioned by the Redhouse for Open End, with and the same. One thing that the piece is not is an exorcism; there is no purging help from the Rosamund Gifford Foundation and the Central New York Community here of a malefic, alien other. There is only a desire for understanding, to get to the Foundation. The piece is dedicated to my brothers, and to my daughter Sally, in heart of the matter. Thus the middle section presents a hallucinatory fragment from recognition of terrors both shared and unspoken. the Good Friday music of Parsifal, re-harmonized and turned upside-down. Even in One Kindness was composed in 2008 for Copenhagen-based Ensemble Nordlys. the world of classical music, with its best of intentions and much-touted “Mozart The impetus for the work came with my hearing, out of the blue, a brief oral memoir Effects,” evil finds a home. This piece is weird and personal – too personal, perhaps on a segment of NPR’s wonderful Story Corps series. The story was, like so many – but a horror movie it’s not. There’s no fantasy here, and no way to cover one’s eyes. with which Story Corps has pole-axed early morning radio listeners, simple, direct, Livre was composed in 2001 for Caroline Stinson. It traces an arc of relationship and shattering: a woman, suffering the dual heartbreak of the loss of her brother to from the first near-drowning in love (leagues of desire), through the pain of separa- AIDS, and the potential banishment of his memory due to her fears of shame and tion (absence and the abyss) to the even more baffling wonder of real relationship: embarrassment, wanders into a shop in search of a sympathy card for her brother’s mystère de l’autre. This last comes from a poem of René Char: finding true union, partner, whispers to one of the clerks of her brother’s death, and immediately the lovers will nonetheless never “reveal the mystery of the other.” receives from him an embrace that carries with it the total acceptance both of her Inventory of Terrors is the latest in a series of recent pieces of mine sparked grief and, by extension, the lost brother she mourns. This one act of compassion on the part of a total stranger transforms her, giving her the space and the strength to Cassatt, Corigliano, Miro, and Degas Quartets, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, acknowledge openly her pain, and to reclaim her memory of the brother she loved I the California EAR Unit, pianist Gloria Cheng, violist Melia Watras, ’cellist Robert found the story both unbearable and wonderful, and the shape inherently musical: Burkhart, the Bohuslav Martinu Philharmonic of Zlin, Czech Republic, Sequitur, the a single, long-breathed progress through a kind of gestural stasis, to a textural and Empyrean Ensemble, Buglisi-Foreman Dance, the Athabasca Trio, CELLO, Flexible harmonic transformation that makes possible a fully-voiced statement of the melody Music, Ensemble Nordlys, of Denmark, and Ensemble Accroche Note, of France. only haltingly attempted by the ‘cello at the outset. The work traces basically one In 2009 he received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts long arc, working its way through a series of textural canons to a kind of border and Letters. He has also received grants and prizes from ASCAP, Yaddo, The New between stillness and motion, beyond which the parts are able to move together with York State Council on the Arts, Meet the Composer, New Music Delaware, and somewhat more freedom and deliberation; somewhat, for the goal here is not some the Eastman School of Music. He won the Lee Ettelson Composer’s Award from miraculous drying of tears, but only the experience of the shift in energy that points Composers Inc. in 2004, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. In the way toward an abiding sense of peace. One Kindness was composed while I was 2007 he was awarded the Roger Sessions Prize for an American composer by the a guest of the Bogilasco Foundation at the Liguria Studies Center in Bogliasco, Italy; Liguria Study Center in Bogliasco, Italy, and was in residence at Bogliasco in the my deepest thanks go to everyone at the foundation for helping to make my time spring of 2008.