Thursday–Saturday, June 18–21, 2015 Faculty Glade, Hertz Hall, Zellerbach Hall Ojai at Berkeley Steven Schick Music Director, OMNR Ojai Music Festival Thomas W. Morris Artistic Director, Ojai Music Festival Matías Tarnopolsky Director, Cal Performances featuring Steven Schick, percussion & conductor Beyond the Score® CalArts Sila Ensemble Interna tional Contemporary Ensemble Claire Chase, Artistic Director Joshua Rubin, Co-Artistic Director red fish blue fish Renga Gloria Cheng, piano Mellissa Hughes, soprano Jacob Nissly, percussion Joseph Pereira, percussion Vicki Ray, piano Wu Man, pipa Ojai at Berkeley is a co-production of the Ojai Music Festival and Cal Performances. Ojai at Berkeley is made possible, in part, by Patron Sponsors Liz and Greg Lutz. Cal Performances’ OMNQ–OMNR season is sponsored by Wells Fargo. CAL PERFORMANCES 15 Thursday–Saturday, June 18–20, 2015 Faculty Glade, Hertz Hall, Zellerbach Hall Ojai at Berkeley FESTIVAL SCHEDULE Thursday, June ?F, @>?C, Dpm Welcome: Cal Performances Artistic and Faculty Glade Executive Director Matías Tarnopolsky Outdoor Concert: Sila: The Breath of the World Fpm Program 1: Beyond the Score®: A Pierre Dream— Zellerbach Hall Pierre Boulez: A Portrait and Debussy Friday, June ?G, @>?C, Cpm Talk: Steven Schick and Claire Chase conduct Hertz Hall Patio an audience participation event to include Lei Liang’s Trans Epm Program 2: Presenting Steven Schick Hertz Hall Xenakis, Stockhausen, Lang, Globokar, Auzet ?>pm Program 3: Debussy, Boulez, works for pipa Hertz Hall Saturday, June @>, @>?C, ??am Program 4: Messiaen, Ravel, Boulez Hertz Hall @:A>pm Program 5: Boulez, Bartók Hertz Hall Cpm Community Response Panel: A conversation with Hertz Hall Patio composer Jimmy Lopez, musicologist William Quillen, conductor Lynne Morrow, and musician Amy X Neuberg Fpm Program 6: Wolfe, Harrison, Chávez, Ginastera On Saturday, June OM, lunch and dinner will be provided by Grace Street catering. Specially priced concert and meal packages are available. Pre-order today at calperformances.org. PLAYBILL INTRODUCTION A HARD RAIN …and what did you hear my blue-eyed son? I heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin’ Bob Dylan, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” HAVE SPENT MY LIFE trying to understand Igeometry. When I was a boy, the world seemed gridded, contained: One square mile of Iowa farmland, a section of 640 acres. My brother Ed and I walked long rows of soy- Eventually, the long straight line became beans on hot summer days, picking button- more than a metaphor. One day, in the most weed. Back and forth, reversing direction purely Forrest Gump moment of my life, I sim- when we reached the end since the usable ply began walking. I left my house in La Jolla world lay only inside the limits of the field. A and headed north. Along the way, I bought a farmer squints at the horizon, but he would backpack, decent walking shoes, and a hat. I never try to go there. had two motivations. The first was to listen to Later, when I heard violinists and cellists the entrancing noises of the California coast, talk about “becoming one” with their instru- from the rush of wind and water to rat-a-tat of ments, I thought that they too were farmers, irrigation systems and the droning of traffic. I embracing a geometry that turned inward. walked through Camp Pendleton and heard But percussion was different. Contemporary the laughter of schoolchildren mingle with the percussionists don’t have an instrument; we booms of cannon-fire. I passed the Lotus have thousands of them. And though we Eaters of Orange County, walked through the might hold a special gong or drum close, the multilingual cacophony of south Los Angeles, way a cellist would her cello, becoming one and hugged the shoulder of Highway 1 along with a tuned saw blade or a suspended brake the Big Sur coast to San Francisco. The other drum could be perilous. Indeed, much of motivation was personal. The night I arrived, what we play is junk: frying pans, steel pipes, I took my girlfriend Brenda to a restaurant hunks of wood—not the reassuring objects of (with valet parking) and proposed. the known musical world, but totems of an How permeable are the boundaries between unmapped exterior. music and life! As we waited for Brenda’s car, I As I walked those long rows of beans, I remembe red a small post-concert dinner in imagined continuing the line, breaking June 1988 at the Warsaw apartment of Józef through the boundaries. By the end of sum- Patkowski. Patkowski had been president of the mer I could be in Denver, maybe California Polish Composers Union in the darkest days of by Christmas. This new geometry—the long Soviet occupation and had fostered a lively mu- straight line—became my model for percus- sical avant-garde in spite of enormous resist- sion. Moving beyond the bounds of the ance. Our conversation about the role of music known and cultivated, a percussionist plays in the stormy politics of that fateful summer gongs, cymbals, cowbells, and bongos and was mirrored by flashes of lightning on the thinks nothing of laying hands on four dis- horizon. For a while we simply listened to the tinct musical cultures. But a string quartet of storm approach. Then Patkowski slapped the violin, mandolin, sitar, and rebab flirts with table. The food was ready, he said. Let’s talk culturally dangerous terrain. Percussionists about life now, not art. Then he threw his head think externally. We don’t expect the world to back and laughed as though such distinctions conform to music; we expect music to con- were absurd. And the rains came. form to the world. © Steven Schick CAL PERFORMANCES Thursday, June 18, 2015, 6pm Faculty Glade Ojai at Berkeley Sila: The Breath of the World PROGRAM John Luther Adams (b. 1953) Sila: The Breath of the World (2014) (Bay Area Première) CalArts Sila Ensemble with participating musicians from International Contemporary Ensemble red fish blue fish PLAYBILL ORCHESTRA ROSTER CAL ARTS SILA ENSEMBLE Brad Hogarth* Stephanie Richard* VIOLIN Aaron Smith David Bowlin (ICE) Jessica Waithe Erik Carlson (ICE) Michael Rocha Hrabba Atladottir* Madeline Falcone TROMBONE Emily Call Brendan Lai-Tong* Mona Tian Kevin Austin Corey Hoeben VIOLA Jenna Hindi Maiya Papach (ICE) Nanci Severance* TUBA Mark Menzies Peter Wahrhafti g* Melinda Rice Luke Storm CELLO PERCUSSION Kivie Cahn-Lipman (ICE) Nathan Davis (ICE) Judith Hamann* Ross Karre (ICE) Elizabeth Brown* David Johnson Betsy Rettig Anna Wray Brietta Greger DOUBLE BASS Leanna Goddard Richard Worn* Robin Hirshberg Charles Carswell Leah Bowden (rfbf) Carlota Cáceres (rfbf) FLUTE Christopher R. Clarino (rfbf) Alice Teyssier (ICE) Fiona Digney (rfbf) Claire Chase (ICE) Dustin Donahue (rfbf) Rachel Rudich Jason Ginter (rfbf) Christine Tavolacci Jonathan Hepfer (rfbf) Sarah Wass Ryan Nestor (rfbf) Jennifer Ingertila Kjell Nordeson (rfbf) Stephen Solook (rfbf) OBOE Nick Masterson (ICE) SOPRANO Claire Chenette Maria Elena Altany Paul Sherman Kathryn Shuman Joseph Thel Micaela Tobin Marja Liisa Kay CLARINET & BASS CLARINET Adriana Manfredi Joshua Rubin (ICE) Amy Golden Campell MacDonald (ICE) Brian Walsh ALTO Ernesto Cruz Jacqueline Bobak Lauren Davis BASSOON Carmina Escobar Rebekah Heller (ICE) Sara Gomez Jonathan Stehney Sharon Kim Argenta Walther HORN David Byrd (ICE) TENOR Alicia Telford* Timur Bekbosunov Allen Fogle Marc Lowenstein Adam Wolf BASS TRUMPET Paul Berkolds Jonah Levy Ian Walker * Berkeley musician CAL PERFORMANCES PROGRAM NOTES SILA: THE BREATH OF THE WORLD Songs are thoughts which are sung out with the West Coast première, we presented the full or- breath when people let themselves be moved by chestral version of the piece. a great force.... Sila comes out of the earth and rises to the Orpingalik, a Netsilik elder sky. The piece traverses 16 harmonic clouds, grounded on the first 16 harmonics of a low N INUIT TRADITION, the spirit that animates B-flat. All the other tones in the music fall “be- Iall things is sila, the breath of the world. Sila tween the cracks” of the piano keyboard—off is the wind and the weather, the forces of na- the grid of twelve-tone equal temperament. ture. But it’s also something more. Sila is in- Like the tuning, the flow of musical time in telligence. It’s consciousness. It’s our awareness Sila is also off the grid. There is no conductor. of the world around us, and the world’s aware- Each musician is a soloist who plays or sings ness of us. a unique part at her or his own pace. The se- Over the past four decades, most of my quence of musical events is composed, but the music has been inspired by the outdoors, but length of each event is flexible. The heard indoors. With Inuksuit—for nine to 99 music breathes. percussionists—I finally composed music in- A performance of Sila lasts approximately tended from the start to be performed and 70 minutes. There is no clearly demarcated heard outdoors. In Sila: The Breath of the ending. As the music of the performance World, I continue this exploration with a full gradually dissolves into the larger sonic land- orchestral palette. Listening to music indoors, scape, the musicians join the audience in lis- we usually try to ignore the ou tside world, fo- tening to the continuing music of the place. cusing our listening on a limited range of © John Luther Adams sounds. Listening outdoors, we’re challenged to expand our attention to encompass a mul- tiplicity of sounds. We’re invited to receive SIDEBAR: SCHICK ON SILA messages not only from the composer and the performers, but also from the larger world Most composers start with a sound, or maybe around us. only an idea for a sound.