Saturday Evening, November 23, 2019, at 7:30

The presents AXIOM Jeffrey Milarsky, Music Director and Conductor Adam Phan, Harp Jaeden Izik-Dzurko, Piano

ELLIOTT CARTER (1908–2012) Mosaic (2004) ADAM PHAN, Harp

GEORGE LEWIS (b. 1952) Ikons (2011)

Intermission

MORTON FELDMAN (1926–87) Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety (1970)

PHILIP GLASS (b. 1937) The Hours—A Suite in Three Movements (2002) (arr. Michael Riesman) The Poet Acts, Morning Passages, Why Does Someone Have to Die?, Dead Things An Unwelcome Friend, Something She Has to Do, I Going to Make a Cake, The Kiss The Hours JAEDEN IZIK-DZURKO, Piano

Performance time: approximately 1 hour and 20 minutes, including an intermission

The taking of photographs and the use of recording equipment are not permitted in this auditorium.

Information regarding gifts to the school may be obtained from the Juilliard School Development Office, 60 Plaza, , NY 10023-6588; (212) 799-5000, ext. 278 (juilliard.edu/giving).

Alice Tully Hall Please make certain that all electronic devices are turned off during the performance. Notes on the Program formalizer of new techniques and sonorities by Matthew Mendez for his instrument remain without parallel. Yet as Carter lamented in his later years, few Mosaic composers during the second half of the century paid much heed to his old friend’s Born: December 11, 1908, in innovations. By way of compensation, it Died: November 5, 2012, in New York City seems, he came to feature them exten- sively in his harp writing, and nowhere was In 1971, when hailed Elliott that more true than in Mosaic. In Carter’s Carter (faculty 1966–1984) as “one of Amer- hands, Salzedo’s trademark sonorities ica’s most distinguished creative artists in (rumbling glissando textures, delicate per- any field,” little could he have imagined that cussive effects, and all manner of alterna- the subject of his tribute would still be going tive plucking sounds) help defamiliarize the strong a full four decades later, in one of the harp, transforming it into something alto- most remarkable feats of longevity in the an- gether more changeable and multifaceted nals of this nation’s musical history. Heir to than the usual impressionist stereotype the visionary Yankee mantle of his early men- would imply. Perhaps this is one way of un- tor Charles Ives, Carter was relatively slow derstanding Mosaic’s title—though it more to find his compositional métier, and even obviously refers to the score’s construction, his formidably multilayered works of the a characteristic Carterian collage of varied 1960s—though hailed as masterpieces by no musical episodes, or “strophes,” to use a less a figure than —were the term by Carter expert David Schiff (D.M.A. products of lengthy, agonizing contempla- ’79, composition). Most of the strophes in- tion. It was only after his 75th birthday that clude the harp in some guise, but they all Carter began to compose with greater ease, aspire, as Carter put it, to “make one coor- and during the last two decades of his life he dinated impression.” grew so prolific as to put the advanced-age harvests of Verdi and Strauss totally in the Ikons shade. By the time of his death at age 103, GEORGE LEWIS Carter’s tenacity and continued delight in the Born: July 14, 1952, in Chicago act of creation had made admirers of even those who had once opposed his aesthetic Composer, trombonist, creative improviser, credos. There was, for instance, compos- computer musician, installation artist, scholar, er John Tavener, whose music was worlds historian, curator, teacher, musical con- away from Carter’s, but who nevertheless science writ large: Though George Lewis is said that the key accomplishment of the all of these things and more, to emphasize American elder statesman was “to rid mod- any of them at the expense of the others ernism of all its angst, creating sparkling edi- would do a disservice to one of the most fices of joy and beauty.” voracious, forward-thinking musicians of our time. A longtime member of the experi- A kind of pocket concertino for harp and mental collective known as the Association mixed septet, Mosaic is one such sparkling for the Advancement of Creative Musicians edifice. It represents Carter’s most sustained and the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” homage to Carlos Salzedo, the French-born Fellowship, Lewis has spent his career harpist and member of the Ives-affiliated questioning and subverting the exclusionary “ultramodernist” circle of U.S. composers belief systems that help structure the musi- of the 1920s and early ’30s. Even today, cal field—for example, that composition and Salzedo’s achievements as an inventor and improvisation are necessarily at odds, or the unstated assumption that African-American Lewis goes on to characterize these musical expression and avant-garde, experi- weighty repeated gestures as “earcons,” mental creativity are mutually exclusive. Not which is the term for the sonic cues that only that, Lewis has long been a trailblazer punctuate the experience of using comput- in the field of interactive computer music, ers and other digital interfaces. Musically, particularly via his watershed “composition” he associates these earcons with the work Voyager, a digital software agent that he of psychoacoustician Stephen McAdams programs to improvise in real time with hu- and composer Roger Reynolds, both of man performers. As the sociologist Herman whom he met in Paris during the 1980s, Gray aptly puts it, Lewis wants to shake up while he was in residence at IRCAM “the deeply embedded terms in which race, (Institut de Recherche et Coordination in this case whiteness, organizes new dig- Acoustique/Musique). ital information technologies despite their being presented as neutral, unmarked, and Nor is this Ikons’ only link with that period beyond cultural politics.” in Lewis’ life, during which time he came to know some of the leading exponents of the Commissioned by the 2010 Vancouver Cul- French spectralist movement. Aptly, then, tural Olympiad, what Lewis designates as Lewis generated the “mountainous” ear- Ikons has two discrete “modes,” to use his cons by instrumentally resynthesizing (i.e. noun: the fully notated octet we will be hear- transcribing) sounds subjected to classic ing this evening and an interactive sculp- spectralist digital manipulations (frequency ture-installation created in conjunction with modulation and stretching). In a similar vein, the Canadian multimedia artist Eric Metcalfe a few of Ikons’ violent breakdowns, which whose sonic component (its “virtual orches- Lewis refers to as “ikon-smashing scenes,” tra,” as Lewis puts it) consists of recorded pay homage to his former Columbia Univer- extracts of the composed score. It is not sity colleague Tristan Murail. But here we just the octet that informed the sculpture, might want to ask: is the ikon-smashing a though: There was a feedback loop of influ- critique of our moment of ubiquitous com- ence in both directions, since Lewis’ discus- puting, or rather, a self-critique of the score’s sions with Metcalfe also inspired the score First Nations inspiration? Perhaps both, itself. Taking First Nations iconography as its since Lewis, pointing to the specific context loose point of departure, Metcalfe’s installa- in which the commission arose, reminds us tion revolved around a set of colorfully dec- that Vancouver is “unceded Coast Salish ter- orative, pyramid-like “ikons,” whose shapes ritory,” and as such, muses that “perhaps evoked British Columbia’s boreal mountains people should be thinking about that aborig- and forests. As far as the score-based iter- inal history when they listen to the music.” ation of Ikons went, this translated into an This is utterly characteristic Lewis, whose almost pictorial impulse, according to Lewis: creative practice unflinchingly confronts our ostensibly “high-tech,” digitally dematerial- In an odd way, I connect the opening ized present, highlighting the ways in which gesture in the work to climbing mountain it remains haunted by the sins and exclu- ranges; if you look at Eric’s “ikons,” you sions of our violent settler-colonial pasts. see the connection, and in the music, there is a persistently articulated “climb- ing” motion—like what people call “memes” today, or auditory “ikons.” Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety U.S. It was through Maurina-Press, Feldman MORTON FELDMAN later said, that he “was instilled with a sort Born: January 12, 1926, in Brooklyn of vibrant musicality,” which he contrasted Died: September 3, 1987, in Buffalo with merely rote “musicianship.” In par- ticular, he recalled being entranced by her A man of contradictions, if ever there were keyboard touch, a sensitivity it is not hard one: that has long been the conventional wis- to relate to his mature fascination with the dom on Morton Feldman, an individual whose luminous “aura” of individual sound events: compositional practice so often seemed to “The way she would put her finger down, sit at the furthest possible remove from his in the Russian way, just the finger, the light- public persona. Critic John Rockwell put the ness of the finger, and produce a B-flat … essential paradox well in his obituary for the you wanted to faint!” composer, writing how “despite the ethereal quality of his music, in person Mr. Feldman Like a handful of other contemporaneous was an almost Rabelaisian figure, with a Feldman pieces, which partook of what he de- pungent Brooklyn accent and an undisguised scribed as “the illusion of feeling,” Madame appetite for sensuous pleasure.” Rockwell Press can be heard as a kind of com- gestures at Feldman’s reputation as an im- posed-out mourning ritual, centered upon an posing, chain-smoking bear of a man, a true insistently repeated descending figure, har- raconteur who so often reveled in crudity and monized and “shaded” variously with each shock value. And yet his almost impossibly iteration. This figure, which some have lik- hypersensitive music, with its painterly at- ened to the sound of a cuckoo clock, sounds tentiveness to infinitely small sonic nuances, 90 times, to match what Feldman thought might well have seemed the very antithesis was the age to which Maurina-Press lived. of all that. Similarly, thanks in part to the ab- (The quotidian title apparently originated in stract expressionist artists who so marked words Feldman’s mother said to him after his worldview as a young man, Feldman long reading an obituary for the pianist—though harbored “heroic,” masculinist ideas about she must have gotten it wrong, for Maurina- what it meant to be a creative practitioner Press’s real age at the time of her death (with problematic sexual behavior to match). was 93.) Though the brass and bell-heavy But by the same token, Feldman can often instrumentation gives the music an aptly be heard desperately struggling to “disap- “Russian,” solemnly Stravinskian tint, what pear into” his music, via a kind of heightened is perhaps most striking is its almost ob- egotism so intensive that it often shaded into sessive tenderness. It is in this sense that its very opposite, pure egolessness. In short, Madame Press may strike the listener as the “Feldman case” remains a valuable ob- analogous to a grief ritual, its heartfelt “cuck- ject lesson as it pertains to the drawing of oos” a mourning object to which the music connections between biography, creative obsessively clings. Feldman also brackets persona, and musical end product. Madame Press with a celesta arpeggio on either end, like a quizzical disappearance. First performed by the Juilliard Ensemble in 1970, the brief Madame Press Died Last The Hours—A Suite in Three Movements Week at Ninety was composed in memory of one of Feldman’s musical role models, Born: January 31, 1937, in Baltimore Vera Maurina-Press. A Russian émigré and one-time member of the circle of Aleksandr One of the highest-profile composers of Scriabin, Press became Feldman’s piano his generation, Philip Glass (Diploma ‘60, teacher in 1938, the year she resettled in the M.S. ‘62, composition) has been exerting a decisive influence on the contemporary the unique nature of the finished footage. A soundscape for nearly half a century. Glass complex, multilayered narrative centering first made his bones as an uncompromis- on both the person of Virginia Woolf and ing minimalist, helping to refocus attention on the impact her novel Mrs. Dalloway has on pulse, tonal centricity, and perceptible on two subsequent generations of female process—musical dimensions that had characters, The Hours seemed virtually to been subject to longstanding neglect in resist musical underscoring, as its produc- the experimental scene within which he ers later remarked. At once nostalgic and initially came of age. In this, he was deeply yet purposefully detached, Glass’ score thus marked by the minimalist and postmini- proved the film’s all-important binding agent, malist painters and sculptors of late 1960s not so much punctuating each of its inter- downtown New York, who taught him woven narrative strands as providing a blank some of the virtues of iterative, modular canvas against which viewers could project forms of artmaking. A naturally open-eared their own associative resonances. This has musician, Glass also recognized that his long been a key tenet of Glass’ film scoring stylistic interests echoed those of some philosophy, of composing so that it “allows of the foremost practitioners of popular for a distance to exist between the specta- and so-called “world” music, something tor-listener and the image,” thereby giving that would later lead to collaborative-style the viewer the freedom to “make the image projects with the likes of David Bowie and her own.” To this end, Glass also chose not Ravi Shankar. Nor did Glass’ idiom stand to delineate The Hours’ three timelines (set still: By the mid-1980s, he had shifted away in 1923, 1951, and 2001) by means of diver- from the audaciously neon-lit patterns he gent styles or period touches. Instead, the trademarked in his early triumphs Music score highlights the piano (accompanied by in Twelve Parts and , an orchestra of mostly strings), with Glass his approach having become at once more taking advantage of the instrument’s almost flexible, equable, and—for lack of a better neutral character in such a way that it would word—“classical.” Today, through his ecu- act as a kind of conduit that “could cross pe- menical stance toward his craft, Glass re- riods very easily.” mains a role model for an entire generation of “post-genre” composers, who are, as is Arranged by Glass’ longtime associate he, equally at home writing choral sympho- Michael Riesman, the suite from The nies and scoring Hollywood soundtracks. Hours faithfully adapts a number of the original soundtrack cues, but recasts them It is indeed via his extensive body of film in the form of a kind of mellow, meditative work that Glass has reached his broadest piano concerto. listenership. By the time he was asked to score English director Stephen Daldry’s Matthew Mendez is a New Haven-based 2002 drama The Hours, Glass was an old critic and musicologist with a focus on 20th- soundtrack hand, having been the winner and 21st-century repertoire. A graduate of of a 1998 Golden Globe for his work on Harvard University and a Ph.D. student at Yale, The Truman Show. Though he long pre- Mendez was the recipient of a 2016 ASCAP ferred to get involved with film projects at Foundation Deems Taylor/ a much earlier stage than is customary for Award for outstanding music journalism. most soundtrack composers, in the case of The Hours, an adaptation of author Michael Cunningham’s novel of the same name, Glass’ services were requested because of Meet the Artists awarded the Ditson Conductor’s Award for his commitment to the performance of American music. Milarsky has been the prin- cipal timpanist for the Santa Fe Opera since 2005. He has performed and recorded with the , Philadelphia Orchestra, and Pittsburgh Symphony and has recorded extensively for Angel, Bridge,

PETER KONERKO Jeffrey Milarsky Teldec, Telarc, New World, CRI, MusicMas- American conductor Jeffrey Milarsky (B.M. ters, EMI, Koch, and London records. ’88, M.M. ’90, percussion) is music director of Juilliard’s AXIOM ensemble and senior lecturer in music at , where he is music director and conductor of the Columbia University Orchestra. While CLAIRE CHEN studying at Juilliard, he was awarded the Peter Mennin Prize for outstanding leader- ship and achievement in the arts. In recent Jaeden Izik-Dzurko seasons, he has worked with ensembles Born in Salmon Arm, British Columbia, including the New York Philharmonic, San Jaeden Izik-Dzurko was the grand prize- Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Phil- winner at the Federation of Canadian harmonic, Milwaukee Symphony, Ameri- Music Festivals’ national competition. can Composers Orchestra, MET Chamber Most recently, he won third prize and the Ensemble, Bergen Philharmonic, Cham- Peter Takács Classical Sonata award at the ber Music Society of Lincoln Center, New Hilton Head International Piano Competi- World Symphony, and Tanglewood Festival tion. Now completing his bachelor’s degree Orchestra. In the U.S. and abroad, he has at Juilliard, where he studies with Yoheved premiered and recorded works by many Kaplinsky, he has performed as a soloist groundbreaking contemporary composers with the Hilton Head Symphony Orchestra, in Carnegie Hall, Zankel Hall, Davies Sym- Kamloops Symphony, Lions Gate Sinfonia, phony Hall, , Walt Disney Con- and Okanagan Symphony Orchestra. He cert Hall, and Boston’s Symphony Hall, and was a winner of the 2019 Gina Bachauer at IRCAM in Paris, among others. Milarsky Piano Competition, which included a con- has a long history of premiering, recording, cert at Weill Recital Hall that was broadcast and performing American composers and on WQXR. A passionate advocate for Ca- throughout his career has collaborated with nadian music, he has been recognized at , , John Cage, several competitions for his insightful inter- Elliott Carter, John Corigliano, George pretations of Canadian compositions. Crumb, , Jacob Harold and Helene Schonberg Scholarship, Druckman, Michael Gordon, David Lang, Gina Bachauer Scholarship, Adele Marcus Steven Mackey, Christopher Rouse, Scholarship , Morton Subotnick, , and an entire generation of young and developing composers. In 2013 he was He has participated in master classes with renowned harpists Judy Loman, Gretchen Van Hoesen, Alice Giles, and Gillian Benet Sella. Phan has spent summers as a mem- ber of the National Youth Orchestra touring both China and Europe with conductors Adam Phan Valery Gergiev and Charles Dutoit. He has Harpist Adam Phan is completing his participated in the Aspen Music Festival bachelor’s degree at Juilliard, where he is with Anneleen Lenaerts and Nancy Allen studying with Nancy Allen, who’s also prin- and is a Jack Kent Cooke Young Artist. cipal harp of the New York Philharmonic. Kovner Fellowship

AXIOM AXIOM is dedicated to performing the mas- Susanna Mälkki, and David Robertson. For terworks of the 20th- and 21st-century reper- its final concert this season on February 27, toire. Since its debut in 2006, the group has 2020, AXIOM will perform the music of Toru established itself as a leading ensemble in Takemitsu, Juilliard faculty member Melinda New York City’s contemporary music scene Wagner, Pierre Boulez, and Thomas Adès. with performances throughout Lincoln Cen- AXIOM opened the 2018–19 season with a ter, in addition to frequent appearances at concert that was part of the New York Phil- Columbia University’s Miller Theatre and harmonic’s The Art of Andriessen festival, Le Poisson Rouge in Greenwich Village. followed by a performance celebrating both AXIOM is led by music director Jeffrey John Corigliano’s 80th birthday and Nico Milarsky and is grounded in Juilliard’s curric- Muhly on the occasion of the Metropolitan ulum. Students receive a credit in chamber Opera’s production of his opera Marnie and music for performing in the ensemble, and a season-closing concert of music by Iannis during any four-year period, AXIOM mem- Xenakis, Caroline Shaw, and . bers will have the opportunity to perform The 2017–18 season comprised programs works by John Adams, Harrison Birtwistle, featuring the music of former Juilliard fac- Magnus Lindberg, and Arnold Schoenberg, ulty members Jacob Druckman and Lucia- among other composers. Guest conduc- no Berio as well as Hans Abrahamsen’s tors of AXIOM have included Alan Gilbert, complete Schnee.

Orchestra Administration Adam Meyer, Director, Music Division, and Deputy Dean of the College Joe Soucy, Assistant Dean for Orchestral Studies

Joanna K. Trebelhorn, Director of Orchestral and Ensemble Operations Matthew Wolford, Operations Manager Daniel Pate, Percussion Coordinator Lisa Dempsey Kane, Principal Orchestra Librarian Michael McCoy, Orchestra Librarian Adarsh Kumar, Orchestra Personnel Manager Michael Dwinell, Orchestral Studies Coordinator Nolan Welch, Orchestra Management Apprentice AXIOM Jeffrey Milarsky, Music Director and Conductor Matthew Wolford, Manager

CARTER LEWIS FELDMAN GLASS Mosaic Ikons Madame Press Died The Hours: A Suite in ADAM PHAN, Harp Last Week at Ninety Three Movements Flute/Alto Flute JAEDEN IZIK-DZURKO, Flute/Piccolo/Alto Flute Chris Wong Flute 1 Piano Mei Stone Mei Stone Clarinet Celesta Oboe/English Horn Sunho Song Flute 2 Marina Iwao Rachel Ahn Chris Wong Bassoon/ Harp Clarinet/Bass Clarinet Contrabassoon French Horn Deanna Cirielli Sunho Song Joey Lavarias Jessica Elder Violin 1 Violin Trombone Trumpet Tal First Sophia Szokolay Yaoji Giuseppe Fu William Leathers Phoenix Avalon Lauren Conroy Viola Percussion Trombone Nikayla Kim Joseph Donald Mizuki Morimoto Yaoji Giuseppe Fu Sahana Shravan Peterson Anna Wei Violin Tuba Cello Tal First Joshua Williams Violin 2 Elena Ariza Sophia Szokolay Cello Percussion Gabrielle Despres Bass Issei Herr Mizuki Morimoto Jaewon Wee Zachary Marzulli Rabia Brooke Bass Celesta Jin Wen Sheu Jacob Kolodny Marina Iwao Anastasiia Mazurok

Cello 1 Viola Issei Herr Lydia Grimes Kayla Cabrera Cello 2 Kayla Williams Joseph Staten Zitian Lyu

Bass 1 Cello Jacob Kolodny Issei Herr Elena Ariza Bass 2 Joseph Staten Zachary Marzulli Bass Zachary Marzulli Jacob Kolodny