Stillness and Change
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Acknowledgments The East Coast Contemporary Ensemble Cover art: “Four Seasons” by Roberta Aylward Stillness and Change Maria Wildhaber, Executive Director John Aylward John Aylward & Dominique Schafer, Photo of Matthias Pintscher by Andrea Medici Artistic Directors Photo of Jo Ellen Miller by Mark Bradley Miller Photo of John Aylward by Derek Jacoby Recording Engineer: Joel Gordon Photos of Paint Trail and Parker River National Assistant Recording Engineer: David Corcoran Wildlife Refuge by John Aylward Producers: John Aylward and Joel Gordon The following grants through Clark University All music is available directly helped in part to fund this album: from John Aylward Faculty Development Grant, Higgins School of Humanities, For William Gerard Aylward Sarah Buie, Director (December 12th 1936 – July 30th 2009) Faculty Research Grant, Thanks to Thomas and Monika, Office of Sponsored Programs and Research, and to Helen Mulligan Nancy Budwig, Dean of Research Thanks also to Martin Boykan, Visual and Performing Arts Department, David Rakowski, Eric Chasalow, Matt Malsky, Chair Eric Chafe and George Tsontakis, and to Louise Glück johnaylward.com www.albanyrecords.com TROY1283 albany records u.s. 915 broadway, albany, ny 12207 tel: 518.436.8814 fax: 518.436.0643 East Coast Contemporary Ensemble albany records u.k. box 137, kendal, cumbria la8 0xd tel: 01539 824008 © 2011 albany records made in the usa ddd waRning: cOpyrighT subsisTs in all Recordings issued undeR This label. The Composer John Aylward has been awarded a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship from Harvard University, a Fulbright Grant to Germany and First Prize from the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). He has also been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Tanglewood, the Aspen Music School, the Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Aylward’s work has been praised for its rhythmic vitality, rigorous formal qualities and lyricism. Aylward’s music has been performed within the U.S and abroad by numerous leading ensembles and soloists. Aylward’s writings on contemporary music can be read in Perspectives of New Music and Mitteilungen Der Paul Sacher Stiftung. As a pianist, Aylward regularly performs contemporary music. Recent concert dates include Harvard’s Paine Hall, The Collis Center at Dartmouth, The American Composers Forum in Washington, DC, the University of Campinas in Sao Paulo, and Distler Hall at Tufts University. In 2005, John began a group for contemporary music, the East Coast Contemporary Ensemble, dedicated to presenting the most adventuresome new music worldwide. One of Aylward’s first initiatives for the group was to establish an international music festival. The Etchings Festival, now in its third season, has attracted professional and student musicians from across the US and abroad and has already premiered numerous new works of contemporary music. The festival is a partnership with the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and is held at their artist space in Auvillar, France. The festival has attracted acclaim for its masterclasses and lessons, taught by luminary composers David Rakowski, Fabien Levy, Louis Karchin, Stefano Gervasoni and Lee Hyla. Aylward is Assistant Professor of Music at Clark University in Massachusetts. Aylward has also taught at Tufts University and at Brandeis University. John Aylward: the importance of place(s) gardens and beaches that populate Glück’s work are a far cry from Aylward’s Tucson. Yet the imagery the poet employs has been a touchstone for the composer in his present environs; it During 1950-’51, the composer Elliott Carter stayed in the Sonoran Desert near Tucson, Arizona. finds a striking affinity in the composer’s recent music. Glück’s work is an inspiration for two It was here that he composed one of his watershed works: the First String Quartet. David Schiff of the pieces on this recording. In Songs From the Wild Iris, Aylward sensitively sets Glück’s has said of Carter’s sojourn that “by going to the desert, Carter left his routine patterns of living in parsimonious yet expressive lines, utilizing a motivic economy and declamatory vocal style that order to discover a new kind of time.” The composer emerged from the desert having solidified a underscores the rhythms of the text with supple subtlety. Stillness and Change is an instrumental number of the ideas that would feature prominently in his mature music; notably, an idiosyncratic meditation on the Glück poem “Island.” At turns explosively energetic and hauntingly repose- approach to the organization of pitch and his radical explorations of the rhythmic domain: of time. ful, it is a score that features rapidly shifting textures and tempi and characterful instrumental It seems fitting that John Aylward, an emerging scholar on Carter and a composer simi- roles. Punctilious woodwind trills and incisive writing for pitched percussion and piano are set larly interested in creating music that is anything but routine in its approach, grew up in this against cantabile string lines in a vibrant colloquy. same area. The vistas and rhythms of desert life have proved formative influences on Aylward’s To come full circle, back to Carter, we can consider the final work on this disc. Aylward creative work. For those outsiders who consider the desert to be a barren place, they need only acknowledges the influence of his in-depth research on a later Carter string quartet—the Fifth, listen to the vibrancy and breadth of Aylward’s ouevre to identify a soundscape that mimics the a piece written nearly 45 years after the First String Quartet—on his own recent compositional abundant variety of flora and fauna that populate the Sonora. activities. Like Carter’s Fifth Quartet, Reciprocal Accord relies on interrelated, aphoristic sections, One can particularly identify their presence in the duo Images of Departure. It is buoyed developing materials in a nonlinear fashion. It affords the listener the chance to accumulate a wide by coloristic harmony reminiscent of another compositional touchstone: Olivier Messiaen. But array of vantage points of similarly unfolding material, teasing out its eventual appearance in fully Aylward is not merely fashioning his work out of the tools of mid-century modernists. Images of formed guise and, along the way, reveling in self-referential details: much akin to a suspense-filled Departure is noteworthy for its incorporation of the plant and animal life of the Sonoran Desert detective story. Also like Carter, Aylward delights in metric shifts, creating an elaborate plan that in a musical replication of its movement. The arching melodic line of the central movement coordinates multiple tempi into an overarching temporal narrative. The overall impression is of soars, as if gliding in flight, while the outer movements share glimpses of rustling winds and a lithely compressed yet variegated design. the skittering of feet on the ground. It is these latter gestures that create a juxtaposition that has Of course, this music is much more than “Northeast meets Southwest.” But the importance become a signature of Aylward’s music: conflating a chromatic pitch palette with the ostinati of place to Aylward, and his creative response to the fragility and beauty of his surroundings, and motoric rhythms often identified with minimalism. wherever he may find himself, are keys to understanding the rich oasis of evocative sounds and While the Sonoran Desert is a vital part of Aylward’s creative journey, it’s equally important erudite inspirations that populate his compositional world. to note the recent eastward change in his environment, encompassing graduate school at Brandeis —Christian Carey University and teaching at Clark University in Massachusetts. With co-directors Maria Wildhaber Christian Carey is a composer, performer, and music theorist. He teaches at Westminster Choir College and Dominique Schafer, he runs the East Coast Contemporary Ensemble, a group that not only performs in the United States but also has recently undertaken residencies in Europe. in Princeton, New Jersey and is Senior Editor at the contemporary classical website Sequenza 21 Louise Glück’s poetry has created a lasting influence on Aylward. It often makes reference (www.sequenza21.com/carey). to the Long Island of her upbringing and to her current home in New England. The suburban Schiff, David.The Music of Elliott Carter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998 (2nd ed.): 55. From The Composer The first movement is a study in economy, growing almost completely from the opening two-note motif. The second movement is bound not by a recurrent motif but rather by a long Stillness and Change (December, 2007 – January, 2008) ascending theme that appears throughout in many contexts. The final movement is a kind of Stillness and Change is an instrumental response to an excerpt from Louise Glück’s poem Island, concert etude also drawing on a single idea of perpetual motion. from The Seven Ages. Songs from the Wild Iris (April, 2007; June, 2008; December, January, 2009-10) Silence. And then For many years, I have been fascinated by Louise Glück’s work, The Wild Iris. Glück’s work flows like one word, a name. And then another word: a song cycle all its own. Helen Vendler writes that the The Wild Iris is written in the, “language again, again. And time of flowers,” and I hear an exploration of the natural elements and the Divine as well. salvaged, like a pulse between My own song cycle takes five selections that show a microcosm of the work’s fifty-four stillness and change. Late afternoon. The soon to be lost poems. Through the five settings, the soprano takes on the characters Glück evokes, oscillat- becoming memory; the mind closing around it. ing between the flowers, their creators and other natural elements. I envision the ensemble as The work opens with a rhythmic motto shared between the entire ensemble: a motto that embodying other contrasting characters in Glück’s dialogue.