Passages Program Notes

PASSAGES Williams Symphonic Winds & Opus Zero Band 4 December 2009 All of the music performed this evening is concerned, either explicitly or tangentially, with notions of passage: of journeys, of transformation, and of transfiguration. The concert, as an entity is also conceived as a sort of journey and return… or better yet, a voyage that culminates in the performance of Steven Bryant’s epic Ecstatic Waters. When Steven and I began discussing last spring having him come to Williams as composer‐in‐residence, we decided to construct a program that served to present Ecstatic Waters in the most interesting manner, and so we agreed that Steven would write several “frames”—the Ecstatic Moments—that would be performed before other pieces on the program and which would foreshadow images and sounds that would be fully realized in Ecstatic Waters. The Moments do more than that, though: they are the touchstones on this musical journey, synthesizing bits of Andriessen, Lang, and Adams with Steven’s sound world, creating a thread that pulls together the various musical narratives, a line that leads from the first distant “G” to the final pure, warm G‐major. We may travel through beauty passages, but in the end, the journey returns gloriously full‐circle. LOUIS ANDRRIESSEN: PASSEGGIATA IN TRAM IN AMERICA E RITORNO (1998) In the mid‐90s, Louis Andriessen was present at performance of Sylvano Bussotti’s La Passion selon Sade; there he met the singer/performance artist Cristina Zavalloni who has been Andriessen’s muse, inspiring him to write not only Passeggiata for her, but also his 30‐minute song cycle La Passione and his opera La Commedia. Responding both to Zavalloni’s stunningly idiosyncratic vocal style and the surrealist text of Dino Campana [see translation on next page], Andriessen reveals in his Passeggiata in tram in America e ritorno (“A Trolley Ride to America and Back”) a newfound, dramatically‐poignant (although not sentimental) sensibility. Here Campana creates disturbing, almost grotesque, images of pain, lost love, and physical and spiritual journeys, and Andriessen responds with an intense miniature—written for the soprano Cristina Zavalloni, the violinist (amplified) Monica Germino, and a subset of the Volharding wind ensemble he formed in 1973; after a brief “overture” for solo piano, Andriessen allows the soprano to weave the text into a harmonically complex, yet transparent, instrumental texture that trembles with both restless fear and relentless energy. As Louis writes, though: I am fully aware of the fact that any music can support any image, but it’s also obvious that different kinds of music can give different meanings to that image. Imagine a young girl walking through a blossoming cornfield. Accompanied by sentimental romantic string orchestra music: she will be in love. Accompanied by gangster‐film music: she is probably on her way to kill her father. To go even further: any music can express any text. Nobody can tell you how jealousy sounds, or desire. However, it is certainly possible to write music which evokes emotions, drama, or beauty, or a story. There are no definite laws telling us which music belongs to which emotions. To deal with certain conventions of what we might call “narrative” music (and in the meantime criticize them) is a challenge I do not want to avoid anymore. The DVD Passeggiata in America e ritorno was made in 1999. The visual artist Marijke van Warmerdam made a rigorous interpretation of Campana’s beautiful, surrealist poetry into, what Andriessene calls, “an adventurous, polyinterpretable imagery.” JOHN ADAMS: “THE PERILOUS SHORE” FROM GNARLY BUTTONS (1996) Commissioned by clarinetist Michael Collins with both Present Music in Milwaukee and the London Sinfonietta, John Adams’s clarinet concerto Gnarly Buttons finds it root not only in the world of classical music, but also in folk and vernacular musics. As Adams writes: The clarinet was my first instrument. I learned it from my father, who played it in small swing bands in New England during the Depression era. He was my first and most important teacher, sitting in the front room with me, patiently counting out rhythms and checking my embouchure and fingering. Benny Goodman was a role model, and several of his recordings–in particular the 1938 Carnegie Hall jazz concert and a Mozart album with the Boston Symphony Orchestra–were played so often in the house that they almost became part of the furniture. Later, as a teenager, I played in a local marching band with my father, and I also began to perform the other clarinet classics by Brahms, von Weber, Bartók, Stravinsky, and Copland. During my high school years I played the instrument alongside him in a small community orchestra that gave concerts before an audience of mental patients at the New Hampshire State Hospital. But strangely enough, I never composed for the instrument until I was almost fifty. By that time my father had died, and the set of instruments I had played as a boy, a Selmer A and B‐flat pair, had traveled back and forth across the country from me to my father (who played them until he fell victim to Alzheimer’s disease) and ultimately back to me. During the latter stages of my father’s illness, the clarinets became an obsession for him, and this gentle, infinitely patient man grew more and more convinced that someone was intent upon breaking into his New Hampshire house and stealing them. Finally, one day, my mother found the disassembled instruments hidden in a hamper of laundry. It was the end of my father’s life with the instrument. The horns were sent to me in California where they grew dusty and stiff, sitting in a closet. But I brought them out again when I began to compose Gnarly Buttons, and the intimate history they embodied, stretching from Benny Goodman through Mozart, the marching band, the State Hospital to my father’s final illness, became deeply embedded in the piece. "Gnarly" means knotty, twisted or covered with gnarls...your basic village elder's walking stick. In American school kid parlance it takes on additional connotations of something to be admired: "awesome," "neat," "fresh," etc. etc. The "buttons" are probably lingering in my mind from Gertrude Stein's "Tender Buttons," but my evoking them here also acknowledges our lives at the end of the 20th century as being largely given over to pressing buttons of one sort or another. NB: clarinets have rings and keys, not buttons. The first movement of Gnarly Buttons—“The Perilous Shore”—is a trope on a Protestant shape‐ note hymn found in a 19th‐century volume, The Footsteps of Jesus, the first lines of which are: O Lord steer me from that Perilous Shore Ease my soul through tempest's roar. Satan's leering help me firmly turn away Hurl me singing into that tremulous day! The opening melodic line played by the clarinet is twisted and embellished from the start, appearing first in monody and eventually providing both micro and macro material for the ensuing musical structures. Bits of the hymn melody are fragmented and tossed through the ensemble, juxtaposing rusticity with modernity, terror with elation, all in an ever‐increasing frenzy of energy and passion. DAVID LANG: HOW TO PRAY (2002, arranged 2009) David Lang’s How to Pray might be the “prequel” to John Adams’s “The Perilous Shore:” while Adams develops an almost cubist interpretation of what a prayer is or can mean, Lang seems to look instead to the fundamental nature of prayer, of how and why we pray. As Lang writes: The reason why the psalms are so central to religious experience is that they are a comprehensive catalogue of examples of how to talk to the Almighty, not by a prophet or a priest but in the voice of a single person out in the world, with problems and concerns not unlike those faced by real people in all times. Of course, it’s like reading one side of a correspondence—we can read David’s letters but the letters back are the ones we really want to see. I am not a religious person. I don’t know how to pray. I do, however, know some of the times and places and formulas that are supposed to make prayer possible. Sometimes I find myself sending those messages out. And then I wait, secretly hoping that I will recognize the response. My first thought for this piece was that I could somehow “borrow” my favorite running piano line from the beginning of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, bringing into the concert the piece that had introduced me to the idea of psalm setting, many years ago. More recently I have been setting the entire book of psalms, in an evening‐length work for solo piano called psalms without words. I have been transcribing my own cantillation of the psalms—the rhythms, the accents and the pacing of the Hebrew. I used a similar strategy to convert the prayer before saying the psalms into the music for how to pray. How To Pray was originally commissioned by the English cellist Audrey Riley, as a kind of spin‐off from the British post‐minimal band Icebreaker. As Lang recollects: “Audrey had this idea to put a little band together that would be at home somewhere between contemporary music and pop. Her band included some people who were intense new music players and some rockers who were from a world in which feeling music was more useful than reading music. I tried to make a piece that took advantage of both of these musical strategies.” Lang gave the Opus Zero Band permission to create the arrangement premiered this evening.

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