In Your Head
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Donald Wheelock Lewis Spratlan John LaMontaine Daniel Asia Matthew St. Laurent David Sanford In Your Head New music for piano four hands Dana Muller Gary Steigerwalt This recording was inspired by the highly successful premiere of Dreamworlds, commissioned of long-time and premiered by Judith Gordon), and Subject to Change, 2011 (chromatic fugue for piano four- hands). friend and colleague Lewis Spratlan for our recital at Mount Holyoke College in February 2016. Colleagues Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, 2014, is yet to be performed. Donald Wheelock and David Sanford agreed to compose works for the album as did Matthew St. Laurent, a former piano student. Lew introduced us to composer Daniel Asia in Tucson where we recently relocated. Awards include first prize in a Hartford Symphony competition, an NEA fellowship, and two Guggenheim In the early 1990’s, colleague and friend John LaMontaine coached us on his Sonata, which completes the grants. Works can be heard on Albany, Harmonia Mundi and New Ariel recordings. Available through the playlist. Except for Sonata, all notes are by the respective composers. composer are recordings of three sonatas for solo strings (violin, viola and cello, each with piano) for Gasp- aro Records (now defunct). MIND GAMES (2017) responds to Dana and Gary’s initial project theme “In Your Head.” While many of my pieces have suggestive titles, and titles of non-vocal music often involve (loosely speaking) metaphors, this one presented a challenge. On one hand, everything is in your head—where else? On the other, the sort of musical metaphor this would entail needed some thought. The first thing that came to mind was After-Images, a set of ten orchestral miniatures written for the Five Donald Wheelock, Irwin and Pauline Alper Glass Professor College Orchestra in 1989. Its first movement, “High Expectations”, seemed to represent a state of mind. Emeritus of Music at Smith College, has a long career as Perhaps I could transcribe that and others for piano four-hands. While “High Expectations” did make the composer and teacher. Works include six string quartets cut with much elaboration and extension, no other movement could be made to work. As with any title, only (Nos. 3 & 4 on Albany Records), solo instrument pieces, the composer may know which came first, title or music. I can say, however, titles for “High Expectations”, song cycles, and larger ensemble and orchestral works. “Panic”, and “Abandon” generated the music for their respective movements as did “Cogitation”, in that Mind Games, his most recent composition, is one of many music might represent a calculated, almost autonomous thinking, working out a difficult puzzle, for instance. for piano, including an ambitious set of Piano Variations, The fourth movement, “Reflection”, had several titles relating to the state of contemplation, as required 2007 (Judith Gordon, Albany Records); Suite for the Piano, for composing a quasi-fugue with a complex subject in a highly introspective, baroque-inflected musical 1971 (Jeffrey Jacob, New Ariel Recordings); two Elegies language. All are tonal pieces except “Panic”, which is very chromatic and dissonant—think of the feeling (premiered 1980, Monica Jakuc; 1984, John Van Buskirk); you’d have halfway to the airport, realizing your passport is in your desk drawer at home. Still, except for A Circular Suite, 1984 (miniatures for younger players); “Panic”, the music of Mind Games is pretty traditional. Which is not to say that cheeky moments of dissonant Impromptu, 1992 (commissioned for a Connecticut youth intrusion don’t make their way into other textures, as in “Abandon”, a movement constructed along the lines competition); Sonata in One Movement, 1998 (premiered of a perpetuum mobile. I don’t have periods of abandon myself, but this is what they might feel like if I did. by Deborah Gilwood); Minute Waltzes, 2012 (three tiny And let me not forget to say the project was a challenge and a pleasure, especially working with Dana and waltzes totaling a minute in duration, commissioned Gary, for which I owe them many thanks. 2 3 Lewis Spratlan, recipient of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in Life is a Dream, libretto by James Maraniss after Calderón’s La vida es sueño, received its world premiere music and the $35,000 Charles Ives Opera Award (2016) by the Santa Fe Opera in 2010, Leonard Slatkin conducting. Hesperus is Phosphorus, commissioned by the from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, was born Crossing Choir and Philadelphia’s Network for New Music, received performances in Philadelphia and New in 1940 in Miami, Florida. His music, often praised for its York in 2012, and was released by Innova. Architect, chamber opera based on the life and work of architect dramatic impact and vivid scoring, is performed regularly Louis Kahn, was released by Navona Records on a CD/enhanced DVD. The Boston Modern Orchestra throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. Project released a CD of A Summer’s Day, Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra, and Apollo and Daphne He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from Variations. Of War (large chorus and orchestra) premiered at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Yale University, where he studied with Mel Powell and Andrew Megill conductor (2015). Nadia Shpachenko premiered Bangladesh (solo piano, commissioned Gunther Schuller. From 1970 until his retirement in 2006 by Piano Spheres) at REDCAT, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles (2015). Common Ground (soloists, he served on the music faculty of Amherst College, and chorus, and chamber orchestra, component of Crossing Choir’s “Seven Responses” Initiative) was also has taught and conducted at Penn State University, premiered by Crossing Choir and ICE at Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral and repeated in New York as part Tanglewood, and the Yale Summer School of Music. The of the Mostly Mozart Festival (2016). recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Composition, as well as Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Spratlan recently completed his fourth opera, Midi, a black French-Caribbean Medea, ca. 1930. Brooklyn’s Bogliasco, NEA, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and Bargemusic presented an all-Spratlan concert including Six Preludes for Piano, Piano Quartet No. 2, and MacDowell Fellowships, Spratlan toured Russia and Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano as part of their Music Now series in 2017. His recorded works may be Armenia in 1989 as a guest of the Soviet Composers’ heard on the labels of Opus One Records, Gasparo, Albany, Koch International Classic, Oxingale, Navona, Union during which time Apollo and Daphne Variations for orchestra was premiered, and Penelope’s BMOP, Innova. Knees, double concerto for alto saxophone and bass, was presented in Moscow’s Rachmaninoff Hall under Emin Khatchatourian. DREAMWORLDS (2015) probes the dreams of three very unlike figures: St. Francis of Assisi; Hitler; and a nameless bureaucrat. Each movement emerges from some primordial, universal dream tissue, within and Recent commissions include Earthrise (one-act opera, libretto by Constance Congdon, San Francisco against which the actual dreams play out. Opera); Streaming (piano quartet, Ravinia Festival for its centennial celebration); Sojourner (ten players, Koussevitzky Music Foundation for Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble); Zoom (chamber orchestra, the New St. Francis dreams repeatedly of his quest for holiness and service to the church, represented here as York ensemble Sequitur); Wonderer (solo piano, Borletti-Buitoni Trust for Jonathan Biss); Shadow (solo fragments of Gregorian chant, and his engaged conversation with his bird friends, some of which, e.g. the cello, Matt Haimovitz); Shining: Double Concerto for Cello and Piano (Matt Haimovitz and Christopher white-throated sparrow, make solo appearances. He dreams of his charmed empathy with wolves, who lie O’Riley); Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra (consortium commission by thirty saxophonists across the down in peace beside him, and of his visit to Egypt, where he attempts to persuade the Sultan to end the country); A Summer’s Day (Boston Modern Orchestra Project). bloodshed of the crusades. But his dreams return always to the search for piety and penitence. 4 5 Hitler dreams of power, conquest, and appetite, and of holy German art – Beethoven and Wagner and complete a piano concerto begun a decade earlier. Earning barely adequate income from composing and Haydn’s Deutschland über alles. But world domination through the sacrifices of war increasingly dominates accompanying opera singers, he considered a career in finance, taking courses to become a stockbroker his dreams. The movement closes in the gas chambers of the “final solution” as life seeps out of the six in 1959. In the same week he learned that he had passed the New York State licensure exam with a score million and out of der Führer’s dreams. of 97 per cent, that his freshly completed concerto had won the 1959 Pulitzer Prize in Music, and that he was to receive his first Guggenheim Fellowship. Premiered by Jorge Bolet and the National Symphony Our poor bureaucrat is just trying to be good and efficient, but she’s not well prepared and makes Orchestra, the Piano Concerto No. 1 “In Time of War”, Op. 9, sparked a succession of commissions that embarrassing mistakes that frustrate her, in her dreams, to entropy and paralysis. Round two: she’s stuck sustained LaMontaine’s career. in a repetitive chore that drives her crazy – she’s too good for this – but she keeps at it until the inevitable explosion occurs. In the third episode pleasant dreams lead her to indulge her romantic side and ultimately Choosing to compose full-time rather than assume a permanent position in music teaching or administra- to all-out romantic passion, which all too quickly subsides. She stays in bed a bit late. Finally the dream tion, LaMontaine told an interviewer in 1984, “Part-time composers risk writing part-time music” and added tissue melts away and she’s left to go back to work.