Andrew Waggoner Terror and Memory Improvisations Third 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 | | 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 , 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. there so productive and magical. He has two CD’s on CRI, both now available on the New World label, and can —Andrew Waggoner also be heard on the Vienna Modern Masters Music From Six Continents series, as well as on solo CD’s by violist Melia Watras and ‘cellist Robert Burkhart. In addition to his concert works, Waggoner has also composed extensively for theatre and for The Composer film, and is an active violinist. He was a founding Director of the Seal Bay Festival of American Chamber Music in Vinalhaven, Maine, and is currently Composer-in- Andrew Waggoner was born in 1960 in New Orleans. He Residence at the Setnor School of Music of Syracuse University. With his wife, the grew up there and in Minneapolis and Atlanta, and studied ‘cellist Caroline Stinson, he formed Open End, giving concerts over the past five at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, the Eastman seasons in New York, Minneapolis, Syracuse, Strasbourg and Florence. Waggoner’s School of Music and Cornell University. Called “the gifted music is available exclusively from Subito Music. More information is available practitioner of a complex but dramatic and vividly colored online at andrewwaggoner.com. style” by the New Yorker, his music has been commissioned and performed by the the Academy of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, the Philharmonic, the Saint Louis, Denver, Syracuse, and Winnipeg Symphonies, the The CSQ is dedicated to the presentation of new American music. Their com- The Performers mitment and passion for new works has made them one of the most sought after Open End (Michael Jinsoo Lim & Andrew Waggoner, ; Melia Watras, viola; interpreters of contemporary music today. For their efforts in bringing contemporary Caroline Stinson, cello; Molly Morkoski, piano) music to a wider audience, the quartet was presented with the ASCAP/CMA Award open End was formed in 2004, the brainchild of several For Adventurous Programming. interconnected musical friendships. Equally committed to The Corigliano won the Chamber Music Yellow Springs Competition and followed new chamber music, particularly by composers with no easily- that up by winning both First Prize and Grand Prize at the 1999 Fischoff Chamber pegged stylistic affiliations, and to free improvisation, the Music Competition. The quartet has performed in many of the nation’s leading ensemble is made up of players well-known in other group music centers, as well as in Italy, Mexico and Korea. More info on the group can be contexts whose collective experience spans the whole of found at coriglianoquartet.com. Western instrumental literature, from the oldest to the newest. Essential to the Open End mission is the reclaiming of improvisation as the birthright of all musicians. At Flexible Music (Timothy Ruedeman, saxophones; Daniel Lippel, guitar; Haruka Fuji, home in venues from galleries and living rooms to concert halls, Open End seeks percussion; Eric Huebner, piano) nothing less than to engage audiences in an experience that is wonderful, intimate, With an instrumentation that blurs the line between challenging and beautiful. Open End gave its premiere concerts in New York City in jazz, rock and classical music, Flexible Music was inspired 2005 and has since performed in New York, Syracuse, New Orleans, Florence and by Dutch composer Louis Andriessen’s Hout for saxophone, Strasbourg. More on Open End can be found at www.openendensemble.com. guitar, piano and percussion. Since 2003, the group has commissioned more than 30 pieces including new works by Hailed as one of today’s most exciting and dynamic string quartets, the Corigliano Nico Muhly, Orianna Webb, Vineet Shende, John Link, Ryan Quartet (Michael Jinsoo Lim & Elisa Barston, violins; Melia Watras, viola; Amy Streber, Mikel Kuehn, Andrew Waggoner, Steve Ricks, Nizan Leibovich, Ethan Barston, cello) Wickman, Ross Bauer, Carl Schimmel, Seung-Ah Oh, and Adam B. Silverman. corigliano Quartet has won the acclaim of audiences and Flexible Music has performed in recent years at the Macau International Music critics across the USA. The New York Times called them “musicians who seem to say, ‘Listen to this!’” The quartet’s Naxos label CD, featuring string quartets by and , was named as one of The New Yorker’s Top Ten Classical Recordings of the Year. Festival in China, at the University of Montreal, Syracuse University, Bowling Green State University’s Mid-American Festival of New Music, Evolution Music Series Acknowledgments (Baltimore), and Chamber Music Now (Philadelphia). Flexible Music’s debut CD, Produced and engineered by Judith Sherman FM, was released by New Focus Recordings in March 2009. Engineering and editing assistant: Jeanne Velonis Quartet Improvisations, Third String Quartet, Livre and Inventory of Terrors were Ensemble Nordlys (Viktor Wennesz, clarinet; Christine Pryn, ; Øystein Sonstad, recorded September 8-10, 2010 at the American Academy of Arts and Letters. cello; Kristoffer Hyldig, piano) Exorcist produced by Andreas Meyer, recorded September 3, 2010, The Danish Ensemble Nordlys is a quartet consisting of The Clubhouse, Rhinebeck, New York violin, cello, piano and clarinet, the classical piano trio and One Kindness produced by Jesper Lützhøft, recorded in December of 2010, one of Mozart’s favorite instruments. Various combinations Sorgenfri, Denmark of these four instruments allow presenting a wide variety of Hamburg Steinway provided by Mary Schwendeman. exciting repertoire. Ensemble Nordlys performs music from Andrew Waggoner’s music is published by Subito Music Corporation. the Baroque era, Viennese and romantic periods, and music of our time. The quartet has given world premieres of more than 60 compositions Cover art by Richard Waggoner ([email protected]) dedicated to the ensemble. Recording made possible by a major award from the American Academy of Arts and Since their critically acclaimed début in 1997, Ensemble Nordlys has performed Letters; post-production made possible by grants from the College of Visual and at prestigious venues around the world, becoming one of the most successful Performing Arts, Syracuse University; and by generous gifts from Oliver E. Allen, and well-established young Danish ensembles. Performances in Denmark include Carson Cooman; Paul B. Gridley; Elizabeth & Malcolm Ingram; Gail Matheson appearances at The Danish National Radio Concert Hall, Aarhus Concert Hall, & Michael Dorrance; Stacy Margolis; Katherine & Ray Mendez; Tawnya Popoff; The National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen Summer Festival, and The Ellen Singer; Bob & Judy Stinson; Steven Stucky; Rami Vamos; Richard & Phyllis Schubertiade, among others. In November 2010 Nordlys toured the USA with Waggoner; and Roger & May Waggoner. concerts at Carnegie Hall, Old Westbury Gardens, and Syracuse University. In addition, Ensemble Nordlys has performed in Poland, Ukraine, Norway, Iceland, and Many thanks to: All the performers, generous and brilliant; Judy Sherman; Andreas Syria. Future engagements include tours in the UK, Germany, Faroe Islands, Ireland Meyer; Jeanne Velonis; Carrie; Ardith Holmgrain; the American Academy of Arts and and Luxembourg. Letters; Steve Stucky; Joan Tower; John Harbison; Sylvia Rosenberg; NOCCA; Bert Braud; tutti a Bogliasco; Ann Clark and VPA; Oliver Allen; Kickstarter; Henry & Sally; Mark & Rich; and my Dad. Andrew Waggoner Andrew Waggoner Livre (2001) 5 Lieues de désir [1:13] y1307 o

r 6 L’Absence [1:59] t Terror 7 L’Abîme [2:57]

and 8 Mystère de l’autre [2:50] Caroline Stinson, cello | Molly Terror Memory Morkoski, piano

1 Improvisation [2:05] Inventory of Terrors (2009) and Me Open End 9 It [1:35] 10 Them [2:19]

Third String Quartet (2002) 11 Him [4:09] m

2 Very Fast [4:54] 12 Me [2:49] ory 3 Sensually, Mysteriously; Suddenly Violent; 13 The Weight of History [2:42] Sadly, Sweetly [9:30] Open End Corigliano Quartet

ory 14 One Kindness (2008) [11:35] m 4 Exorcist (2006) [11:55] Ensemble Nordlys Flexible Music 15 Improvisation [5:03]

and Me and Open End

Total Time = 68:57 Terror

www.albanyrecords.com TROY1307 albany records u.s. t

915 broadway, albany, ny 12207 r tel: 518.436.8814 fax: 518.436.0643 o albany records u.k. y1307 box 137, kendal, cumbria la8 0xd tel: 01539 824008 © 2011 albany records made in the usa DDD

Andrew Waggoner Andrew warning: copyright subsists in all recordings issued under this label.