Earplay Season 31: Test of Time Fantasies of Structures One should know about all the structures of fantasy and all the fantasies of structures, and mix surprise and enigma, magic and shock, intelligence and abandon, form and antiform. — Stefan Wolpe Monday, February 1, 2016 Herbst Theater Welcome Tonight Earplay celebrates the reopening of beautiful Herbst Theater as we begin our 31st season with four works that will stand the test of time: the world premiere of a work by Eric Sawyer, the Earplay Fantasy composed by Andrew Imbrie for Earplay’s 10th anniversary in 1995, a solo viola piece by Shulamit Ran, and a piano sonata by Stefan Wolpe, our featured composer for this season. We hope you join us for a preconcert conversation with composer Eric Sawyer. And please join us after the concert to chat with composers, Earplayers, and Earplay board members over a glass of wine. Earplay fervently believes in its mission, and we hope you do too. We want to continue to commission exciting new work and to present inspired performances of vibrant new music for decades to come, but we need your help to make it possible. Please visit our website earplay.org for details on our Earplay Shapes the Future campaign. We hope you will donate whatever you can — every dollar really helps! Enjoy tonight’s concert, and please join us again on March 14th at ODC Theater when we present more outstanding new chamber music. — Earplay Board of Directors Board of Directors Staff Terrie Baune, musician representative Lori Zook, executive director Bruce Bennett Terrie Baune, scheduler Mary Chun, conductor Renona Brown, accountant Richard Festinger Ellen Ruth Rose, artistic coordinator Larissa Koehler Ian D. Thomas, sound recordist May Luke, co-chair R. Wood Massi, director of education Advisory Board Stephen Ness, secretary/treasurer Laura Rosenberg, co-chair Chen Yi Richard Felciano William Kraft Kent Nagano Wayne Peterson 2 Monday, February 1, 2016 at 7:30 p.m. Herbst Theater Earplay 31: Test of Time Fantasies of Structures Earplayers Terrie Baune, violin Tod Brody, flutes Mary Chun, conductor Peter Josheff, clarinets Thalia Moore, cello Ellen Ruth Rose, viola Brenda Tom, piano Guest Artists Dan Flanagan, violin Daniel Kennedy, percussion Loren Mach, percussion Pre-concert conversation at 6:45 p.m.: Bruce Christian Bennett, moderator with Eric Sawyer, composer Please power down your cellphone before the performance (do not just silence it!). No photography, videography, or sound recording is permitted. Programs are subject to change without notice. Earplay’s season is made possible through generous funding from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Ross McKee Foundation, the San Francisco Foundation Fund for Artists, San Francisco Grants for the Arts, the Thomas J. White and Leslie Scalapino Fund, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, and generous donors like you. 3 Program Stefan Wolpe Sonata für Klavier, Op. 1 (1925) I. Sehr schnell II. Fast langsam (warm, aber nicht zimperlich) III. Schnell Brenda Tom Eric Sawyer Masquerade (2014) World premiere Ellen Ruth Rose Daniel Kennedy INTERMISSION Shulamit Ran Perfect Storm (2010) Ellen Ruth Rose Andrew Imbrie Earplay Fantasy (1995) Earplay commission Mary Chun Tod Brody Peter Josheff Dan Flanagan Thalia Moore Brenda Tom Loren Mach Earplay dedicates tonight's concert to the memory of Yoshi Kakudo, Curator Emeritus of Japanese Art at the Asian Art Museum. Yoshi was a versatile artist and philanthropist and a generous supporter of Earplay. 4 Program Notes Sonata für Klavier, Op. 1 (1925) by Stefan Wolpe for piano I. Sehr schnell II. Fast langsam (warm, aber nicht zimperlich) III. Schnell The Piano Sonata, Op. 1 is music that is formally experimental in nature, in which the thematic and modulatory elements withdraw to the background in favor of purely rhythmic and dynamic elements. One can apply the term Stehende Musik (music of stasis) to these pieces, as here formal tensions and relaxations are developed from the principle of repetition (in contrast to variation). This music attempts to analyze the concept of musical time to the furthest possible limit. The first and third (final) movements are characterized by quick aggressive and percussive rhythmic figures divorced from any sense of harmonic progression. The second, and longest, movement explores modal melodic material while paying particular attention to irregular phrasing and crisp articulation — it perhaps hints at a style of baroque keyboard music à la Couperin (or perhaps shades of Satie). — B.B. ◆ Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972), born in Berlin, fled Europe in the 1930s, first for Palestine and later for New York. Ardent socialist and composer of workers' and Jewish music, associate of the Bauhaus movement as well as artists such as Klee and Kandinsky, Dadaist for a while, and student of Ferruccio Busoni, he came to admire the work of the Second Viennese School (Schoenberg and Webern in particular). Twelve-tone rows served as his creative jumping off place, or perhaps I should say dancing forth place, for he came to express an amazingly profuse and profound aesthetic, expanding twelve-tone techniques to include tonality, jazz, and modal music. He taught at Black Mountain College, Darmstadt, and in New York, where his many students, including Morton Feldman, revered him. But he sometimes struggled to be recognized for the great composer that he was. In 1984 John Cage said that when one visited Wolpe's home in New York City, "one had the feeling that one was at the true center of New York.... And 5 that was what gave a very special strength to one's feeling about Stefan, that it was in a sense a privilege to be aware of him, since it was like being privy to an important secret." Chief among Wolpe’s accomplishments are his writings (a good bibliography can be found at Oxford Music Online), where his optimism and poetic embrace of music and life shine through. Here is a sample from his 1967 essay Thinking Twice. The form must be ripped endlessly open and self-renewed by interacting extremes of opposites. There is nothing to develop because everything is already there in reach of one's ears. If one has enough milk in the house, one doesn't go to the grocery store. One doesn't need to sit on the moon if one can write a poem about it with the twitch of one's senses. One is there where one directs oneself to be. On the back of a bird, inside of an apple, dancing on the sun's ray, speaking to Machaut, and holding the skeleton's hand of the incredible Cézanne — there is what there was and what there isn't is also. Don't get backed too much into reality that has fashioned your senses with too many realistic claims. — R. W. M. ◆ Masquerade (2014) by Eric Sawyer for viola and percussion Masquerade for viola and percussion imagines a nocturnal scene where appearances are indistinct and human faces concealed. A single melodic instrument, the viola, works with modal scales in improvisatory fashion, supported by dance rhythms in the percussion. The instruments eventually lead each other far afield in harmony, character, and tempo, but the mottos accumulated from the opening continually resurface, providing a dual sense of undertaking a journey and remaining in the same place. — E. S. ◆ The music of Eric Sawyer receives frequent performances across the country and internationally, including at New York's Weill and Merkin concert halls and at Tanglewood, as well as in England, France, and Germany. Many of his larger works spring from American historical subjects, while his output also includes a substantial amount of abstract instrumental music. 6 Sawyer's first opera Our American Cousin (libretto by John Shoptaw) tells the story of Lincoln's assassination at Ford's Theater through the eyes of the actors and audience, and was premiered in 2008 by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and released as a CD on the BMOP/sound label. A second opera, The Garden of Martyrs (libretto by Harley Erdman), based on the infamous 1806 Daley/Halligan murder trial in Northampton MA, received its premiere in September 2013 from the Springfield Symphony Orchestra. A third, The Scarlet Professor, was presented in an initial workshop in June 2015. Sawyer's Fantasy Concerto: Concord Conversations, based on the American Transcendentalists, was given its premiere in October 2013 by Triple Helix and the Concord Orchestra. A chamber music collection String Works and the cantata The Humble Heart based on texts of the American Shakers are available on CD from Albany Records. Sawyer has received the Joseph Bearns Prize, awards from the Tanglewood Music Center and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a recent prize from the Ravinia Festival for his piano trio Lincoln's Two Americas. Sawyer's music has also been performed by the Brentano String Quartet, Triple Helix, Boston Musica Viva, San Jose Chamber Orchestra, Concord Orchestra, Seraphim Singers, Radius Ensemble, Laurel Trio, Ives Quartet, Arden Quartet, Lighthouse Chamber Players, Essex Chamber Players, Earplay, and Empyrean Ensemble. Following four years as Chair of Composition and Theory at the Longy School of Music, Sawyer joined the composition faculty of Amherst College in 2002. His teachers have included Leon Kirchner, Ross Bauer, Tison Street, George Edwards, and Thomas Benjamin. Sawyer's website is ericsawyer.net. ◆ Perfect Storm (2010) by Shulamit Ran for viola When violist Melia Watras approached me about composing a solo viola piece for her, she presented an idea that added an intriguing extra dimension to this commissioning project. Her hope was to have me create a work that, in some way, alluded to, or made use of, an existing work of my 7 choice from the viola repertoire, enabling both works to be performed side by side.