Program Notes International Contemporary Ensemble
Takemitsu, Rain Spell (1982)
The music of Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu (1930–96) reveals the influence of such notable Western modernists as Arnold Schoenberg, John Cage, and Olivier Messiaen. But perhaps its greatest inspiration is nature—especially water. Rain Tree (1981) and Toward the Sea (1981) precede Rain Spell (1982), and riverrun (1984) follows; the last work finds parallel inspiration in the free-flowing novels of James Joyce (the title being a quote from the first line of Finnegan’s Wake). In all of these aqueous pieces, Takemitsu translates the fluid properties of water into the liquid motion of sound. They are also united by the image of rain pouring into rivers, which then lead to the ocean—the “sea of tonality,” in the composer’s own words.
A note in the score of Rain Spell explains further that the work “is intended to realize the magical image and the gradation in coloration of the rain in a small-scale ensemble.”
Dai Fujikura, Halcyon
Though often described as the leading Japanese composer of his generation, Dai Fujikura has lived in London since he was a teenager, and so considers himself as much British as Japanese. He avoids any obvious Japanese references in his music; indeed, Fujikura rejects the notion of performing an identity in his music. His concerns are more strictly musical: Many of his works, including Halcyon, are scored for unusual instrumental combinations that can generate a wide variety of textures and timbres.
Halcyon, premiered in April 2011 by the Network for New Music Ensemble, was in some sense inspired by a student composition for the same instruments (clarinet and string trio). Fujikura was never happy with the original piece and wanted to write something else as a form of “revenge.” In Halcyon, he explores the “emotion of the texture”—meaning, how quickly the mood changes from aggressive, as at the start of the piece, to lyrical. His goal is not to juxtapose large sections of faster and slower music, marcato and cantabile playing, but instead to move quixotically between the two.
The piece also explores “how the clarinet sonority can become an integral part of the string sound,” the composer himself explains. What’s at stake in combining instruments from two distinct families (woodwind and string) is especially clear in lyrical sections. Here the basic difference between the two instruments is revealed: The clarinetist needs to breathe, while the strings can continue to bow. This simple fact gives the composer much to play with in terms of exploring the elision of phrases, moments of rest, and the intertwining of string and wind lines.
The title is not especially significant: Fujikura simply thought the word looked nice on the page.
Kaija Saariaho: Terrestre
Finnish composer Kaija Sarriaho (b. 1952) studied composition first at the Sibelius Academy in Finland, then at the Freiburg Hochschule in Germany, and finally the famed Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris, where she resides. She has composed over 80 works in various genres that are recorded on over 40 compact discs. Her music has been described (by Allan Kozinn of The New York Times) as “consistently exciting and eventful.”
Terrestre is a resetting of the second movement of her flute concerto, Aile du songe (Wing of Dream), and falls in two parts. The titles of each come from a collection of poems by Saint-John Perse, Oiseaux (Birds). The first section, Oiseau dansant (Dancing Bird) describes a bird whose singing is so beautiful, it inspires an entire village to dance. “I love this image,” says flutist Claire Chase, “and return again and again to it as a metaphor for the flute playing throughout the ages.” The second, L’Oiseau, un satellite infime (The Bird, an infinitesimal satellite), begins after a virtuosic cadenza, and features a continuously rising scale figure that flutters at the end up into the heavens.
John Zorn: Walpurgisnacht (2004)
John Zorn (b. 1953) is a versatile musician, composer, and producer whose career has traversed many styles—from jazz to punk, film and cartoon music, classical music, and avant-garde improvisation. Best known as a saxophonist, he also plays guitar, keyboards, and percussion (among other instruments). All of these styles, genres, and instruments blend together in his music and music-making. In 2006 his talents and achievements were recognized with a fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation.
“Walpurgisnacht” is the name of a spring festival, the counterpart to our Halloween, celebrated on April 30 or May 1 throughout Northern and Central Europe. Zorn simply began the piece that day; the real inspiration for the music lay in the works of Anton Webern. In keeping with Zorn’s attraction to numerology, he conceived the first two movements to be the same number of measures as Webern’s own string trio (65 and 193)—though actually Zorn’s first movement is 68 measures long, with 3 bars tacit (silent), and the second 129. The third movement, which Zorn nearly discarded because it struck him as “awkward,” eventually came to seem “strange and beautiful,” full of the “shimmering, magical feeling of a hypnotic full moon.”
George Crumb: Vox Balaenae
American composer George Crumb (b. 1929) is best known for his inventive approach to sound, but his experiments in timbre are always deployed for expressive effect rather than for the sake of purely technical innovation. Among his best known works are Ancient Voices of Children, a set of songs on texts by Federico Garcia Lorca composed for virtuosic mezzo Jan DeGaetani, and Black Angels, written for electric string quartet in evocation of the Vietnam War. Crumb received the Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for Echoes of Time and the River, one of only three orchestral works in his oeuvre. He is first and foremost a composer of chamber music.
Crumb developed a host of “extended techniques,” or new ways of producing sound from traditional instruments, and also championed unusual instruments including tuned “prayer stones” and a musical saw. Vox Balaenae (1971) or Voice of the Whale, which was inspired by the singing of humpback whales, requires the flutist to sing and play at the same time, and the cellist to mimic the cries of a seagull. The three instruments—flute, cello, and piano—are all amplified. The cello is specially tuned (B-F#-D#-A, known as scordatura), and the score also calls for four “antique cymbals” to be played by the flutist and cellist. The pianist is required to reach inside the instrument to play pizzicato (plucking the strings) and harmonics (stopping strings to produce ghostly partials).
Many of Crumb’s chamber pieces exude a dramatic, or even theatrical, sensibility—including “Voice of the Whale.” Each of the three performers is asked to wear a mask, and the stage is to be awash in deep-blue lighting. The composer explains: “The masks, by effacing the sense of human projection, are intended to represent, symbolically, the powerful impersonal forces of nature.”
The work falls in three parts: an opening vocalise, which Crumb describes as “a kind of cadenza for the flutist”; followed by five variations on the “sea theme”; and a concluding “Sea Nocturne.” The end of the cadenza is marked, ironically, by a quotation from Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra—a rather portentous fanfare perhaps most familiar from its use in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. The ensuing variations are each named for a geological era, from the Archeozoic (maybe 3.8 billion years ago) through the Cenozoic Era, to the present. Gull cries echo at the opening, and Zarathustra returns at the end to announce the appearance of man. Crumb describes the final variation as being “dramatic, with a feeling of destiny.”
The “Sea-Nocturne” is a final elaboration of the sea theme, a kind of cumulative variation that features antique cymbals. Crumb hoped to suggest “a larger rhythm of nature” and a certain transcendence of chronological time; the eternal present is captured in music by a repeated 10- note figure that gradually escapes our hearing, yet still continues on.
⎯ Program notes Elizabeth Bergman