Saturday Evening, November 23, 2019, at 7:30 The Juilliard School 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 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, 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 ELLIOTT CARTER century paid much heed to his old friend’s Born: December 11, 1908, in New York City 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 Aaron Copland 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 Igor Stravinsky—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.