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Home , David Lang (composer), Diderik Wagenaar, Gnarly Buttons, Louis Andriessen, Man Against Machine, Matthijs Vermeulen

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 ‐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, 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 La Commedia. Responding both to Zavalloni’s stunningly idiosyncratic vocal style and the surrealist text of [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 , 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 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 Sinfonietta, ’s 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 concert and a Mozart with the Boston 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 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 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 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. Much of the work is the same: the , , and percussion parts are identical. The major changes are that the part has been orchestrated for , flute, 2 horns, , , and , while a flute and alto take over the piano’s sixteenth notes.

For a program at the Next Wave Festival called The New Yorkers that Lang created with his colleagues Michael Gordon and , the three gave previously written music to visual artists—including Doug Aitken, William Wegman, , Laurie Olinder—for their artistic responses. As Lang states: “I gave a copy of How To Pray to and he made a beautiful and very moody film in response.”

In 2006, Morrison created The Highwater Trilogy—which includes How to Pray—as an examination of our relationship to the threat of natural disaster by combining archival footage of icebergs, hurricanes, and floods with a soundtrack by David Lang and Michael Gordon. A collage of ancient newsreel footage of storms, floods and icebergs, The Highwater Trilogy is a response to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, looking at the representation of disaster through beautifully scarred archival clips. In these “hauntological shadowplays,” figures vanish into the flood of history, only to reemerge as ghostly apparitions and unreal visions. Interestingly, though, Morrison was looking for “iceberg” footage for a different film: a project about the sinking of the Titanic on which he had been working with Gavin Briars. Morrison, though, noticed the connection between his found footage and Lang’s music, writing: “I just started looking for footage of icebergs for obvious reasons, literal reasons, and never thought that same footage would end up in a piece by David Lang in which there’s maybe two or three notes going on for ten or twelve minutes. But when I thought of David’s music, I thought of that footage and went back to it.”

As Morrison explains in an introduction to his films:

The frame pauses briefly before the projector’s lamp, and then moves on. Our lives are accumulations of ephemeral images and moments that our consciousness constructs into a reality. No sooner have we grasped the present, it is relegated to the past, where it only exists in the subjective history of each individual. The images can be thought of as desires or memories: actions that take place in the mind. The film stock can be thought of as the body, that which enables these events to be seen. Like our own bodies, this celluloid is a fragile and ephemeral medium that can deteriorate in countless ways.

MICHEL VAN DER AA: ATTACH (2000) Van der Aa has quickly become one of the most highly regarded composers in The today. In 2000 Art Foundation awarded van der Aa the Incentive prize for Attach, a work which received rave reviews after its 2000 premiere, such as that by Aad van der Ven, who wrote in the Haagsekrant: “Attach is a brand‐new work by composer . In this piece the ensemble confronts a soundtrack, on which one hears, among other things, frantic pulses. Man against machine. The work demanded the utmost concentration from the Schoenberg ensemble. The idea isn’t new, but van der Aa certainly does something special with it. Special in terms of sound color and interaction. A composer with fantasy and sense of timing.” Interestingly, while the work is popular in Europe, it has never been performed in the U.S., and so tonight’s performance marks both the American and collegiate premiere of Attach for ensemble and soundtrack.

Michel writes the following about Attach:

Attach is a high‐density piece. The central theme is the relationship between the musicians and the soundtrack: the soundtrack precedes the musicians and challenges the players to react. It then elaborates on the existing material, adding new overtones to chords and sequences and transforming the tone color of the instruments. In Attach the sounds of the ensemble and soundtrack are glued together: they appear to run parallel to one another, even when they contrast. The most prominent ingredient from the outset is a regular, mechanical pulse occurring in several tempi simultaneously. In the exposition this pulse alternates with rapid unison passages and sustained chords that are strangely discolored by the electronic sounds “attached” to them.

Then follows a much more tranquil passage, in which the astute listener may recognize the opening section of Attach, now reduced to a skeleton of unraveled chords. This quiet, reflective texture is gradually invaded by pulsing beats and faster notes until the music explodes into a headlong rush of fleeting phrases, hammered chords and dramatic pauses, that gradually intertwine and culminate in a feverish tutti in which the unison has given way to a rapid succession of chords (the same ten chords, in fact, that form the fundament of the entire “Preposition trilogy”). Finally the music screeches to a halt in a furious attachment, after which the calm counter‐theme takes over the discourse. Dry pulses soon disrupt this passage, going on to end the piece on their own.

Attach is part of the “Preposition” trilogy – Above, Between, Attach, each part focusing on a specific positioning of the musical material. The entire trilogy will be performed by Opus Zero Band and the Williams Percussion Ensemble on January 9, 2010, as a part of I/O Fest ’10 (new music festival, in and out of THE BOX.)

CLAUDE DEBUSSY: LA CATHÉDRALE ENGLOUTIE (1910) In 1910 and 1913, respectively, composed two books of Préludes for piano solo that, in the words of Cecilia Dunoyer, “bring the development of the independent prelude to its highest point by their complexity and brevity, their infinite variety of moods, textures, subject matter, emotions and the richness of the tonal palette. Humor, disenchantment, parody, joy, fear, tragedy, loneliness, serenity, silence, light, darkness—all are concisely contained in these musical pages, conceived by a genius at the apex of his creative powers.” La cathédrale engloutie (Book I, no. 10) may be the closest example in Debussy’s oeuvre of program music. The prelude was inspired by an ancient Breton legend of the Isle of Ys: to punish the people for their sins, the Cathedral of Ys is engulfed by the sea; once a year (or, in a different version of the legend, at sunrise on clear mornings), the sunken cathedral rises out of the sea briefly—bells tolling, organ rumbling, and priests chanting—before once again returning to the bottom of the sea. Debussy evoked this miraculous phenomenon by suggesting the parallel harmonies of Medieval organum and the smooth melodic voice‐leadings of Gregorian chant, as well the chiming of bells and the organ pedal points. The work is one of Debussy’s most popular works, not only in its original version for piano, but also in numerous transcriptions (including one by Leopold Stokowski) that tend to heighten the programmatic nature of the piece. As pianist Paul Roberts writes: “The prelude evokes uncannily the misty waters, the sound of cathedral bells and plainchant, and the awe inspired in those who have experienced the supernatural. Yet the tale is only a pretext for a piano piece, a structure from which music can evolve.” extended this contention further when he wrote: “The precise relationship between music and title in Debussy’s Preludes cannot be ascertained without taking into account the composer’s manner of inscribing the title at the end of each prelude, perhaps to suggest that he did not want the allusions to be taken too seriously, or quite possibly to reveal that the title was suggested by the music, and not the other way around.” Debussy would certainly agree:

Let us maintain that the beauty of a work of art must always remain mysterious; that is to say, it is impossible to explain exactly how it is created. Let us at all costs preserve this magic peculiar to music, for of all the arts it is the most susceptible to magic… In the name of all the gods, let us not attempt to destroy or explain it.

Perhaps, but it cannot be denied that, as Ceri Richards indicates, “Debussy is a visual composer. His sounds and structures are derived from a visual sensibility. He gives me a feeling of the sounds of nature, as Monet does.” Pianist Paul Roberts, author of Images: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy, sees an even more vivid analogy—between Debussy’s piano prelude and Monet’s Impressionist series of Rouen Cathedral paintings:

The pulse is implacable, though fluide, while the deep bass chords, resonating sonorously against the upper line (also implacable, never deviating in pitch as the bass falls), creates a sense of looming presence which might be compared to the effect of Monet’s cathedral paintings. Monet’s Rouen Cathedral—Morning Effect, for example, is remarkable in the way in which, despite its soft, enveloping blur, it represents not only mass, but line…. The visual analogy is inescapable, whether it is with the paintings of Monet or with an imaginary cathedral arising from the sunken city of Ys on the Brittany coast…. It is impossible to say whether Debussy admired Monet’s series paintings of the 1890s, but he could not have failed to know them.

And so, perhaps the next time Monet’s Rouen Cathedral in viewed at the Clark, it will be to strains of Debussy’s “engulfed cathedral.”

STEVEN BRYANT: ECSTATIC WATERS (2008) In short order, Steven Bryant’s Ecstatic Waters is quickly establishing itself as one of the most significant and innovative works written for wind band. Commissioned by a consortium of schools led by Bruce Moss at Bowling Green State University and Jerry Junkin at University of Texas Austin, Ecstatic Waters is being performed extremely frequently. Just this week alone, Bryant attended a performance on Tuesday at the University of North Carolina Greensboro and he will be flying to Michigan State University for a concert on Sunday. That is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, though: there are already seven more performances of the work scheduled for the spring 2010 semester after a total of seventeen this fall! As Bryant writes:

Ecstatic Waters is music of dialectical tension ‐ a juxtaposition of contradictory or opposing musical and extra‐musical elements and an attempt to resolve them. The five connected movements hint at a narrative that touches upon naiveté, divination, fanaticism, post‐human possibilities, anarchy, order, and the Jungian collective unconscious. Or, as I have described it more colloquially: W.B. Yeats meets Ray Kurzweil in the Matrix.

The overall title, as well as "Ceremony of Innocence" and "Spiritus Mundi" are taken from poetry of Yeats ("News for the Delphic Oracle," and "The Second Coming"), and his personal, idiosyncratic mythology and symbolism of spiraling chaos and looming apocalypse figured prominently in the genesis of the work. Yet in a nod to the piece's structural reality—as a hybrid of electronics and living players—Ecstatic Waters also references the confrontation of unruly humanity with the order of the machine, as well as the potential of a post‐human synthesis, in ways inspired by Kurzweil.

The first movement, “Ceremony of Innocence,” begins as a pure expression of exuberant joy in unapologetic Bb Major in the and . The movement grows in momentum, becoming perhaps too exuberant—the initial simplicity evolves into a full‐throated brashness bordering on dangerous arrogance and naiveté, though it retreats from the brink and ends by returning to the opening innocence.

In Mvt. II, “Augurs,” the unsustainable nature of the previous “Ceremony” becomes apparent, as the relentless tonic of Bb in the crystal water glasses slowly diffuses into a microtonal cluster, aided and abetted by the . Chorale‐like fragments appear, foretelling the wrathful self‐righteousness of Mvt. III. The movement grows inexorably, spiraling wider and wider, like Yeat's gyre, until "the center cannot hold," and it erupts with supreme force into “The Generous Wrath of Simple Men.”

Mvt. III is deceptive, musically contradicting what one might expect of its title. While it erupts at the outset with overwhelming wrath, it quickly collapses into a relentless rhythm of simmering 16th notes. Lyric lines and pyramids unfold around this, interrupted briefly by the forceful anger of a chorale, almost as if trying to drown out and deny anything but its own existence. A moment of delicate lucidity arrives amidst this back‐and‐forth struggle, but the chorale ultimately dominates, subsuming everything, spiraling out of control, and exploding.

“The Loving Machinery of Justice” brings machine‐like clarity and judgment. Subtle, internal gyrations between and underpin the dialogue between lyric melody (solo Clarinet and ) and mechanized accompaniment ( and bass clarinets). An emphatic resolution in Ab minor concludes the movement, floating seamlessly into the epilogue, Spiritus Mundi. Reprising music from Mvt. I, this short meditative movement reconciles and releases the earlier excesses. About the composers LOUIS ANDRIESSEN (b. 1939, in Utrecht, Holland) is, without question, the most significant living Dutch composer; by most accounts, he is one of the most eminent and influential composers in all of Europe, as well as (for some) in the northwestern corner of Massachusetts. Over the last six years, the Williams Symphonic Winds have presented the collegiate premiere of his monumental (the second American performance, and the first by non‐Dutch musicians), performed Workers Union twice, M is for Man, Music, Mozart numerous times, and given the American premieres of of the Netherlands and Hymne to the memory of .

Andriessen’s music blurs the boundaries between “high” and “low” arts, not just in his choice of instruments (often dominated by wind, brass, , and electric guitars), but in his musical language, which combines a jazz/rock aesthetic with post‐WWII intellectualism. Following an extended collaboration with which resulted in a score for the film M is for Man, Music, Mozart (1991) and two —the controversial ROSA: Death of a Composer (1994) and the post‐modernly lyric (1998)—Andriessen has recently completed his third opera, La Commedia, which was premiered this past June in Amsterdam. Andriessen will be composer‐in‐residence at Carnegie Hall this spring, where his La Commedia, De Staat, and other works will be performed.

When asked how he became a composer, Louis will usually answer: “I merely joined my father’s business.” The Andriessen family boasts generations of musicians, beginning with Louis’s great‐ grandfather Cornelis (1816‐1893), a choir conductor and music teacher, and his grandfather Nicolaas (1845‐1913), a prominent Dutch organist. Louis grew up hearing the music that was admired by his father Hendrik (1892‐1981) and brother Juriaan (1925‐1996), both composers and his first two teachers. As Louis recalled, his father “favored a French classicist approach to music. Music was extremely important as an objective beauty, and we should therefore realize that we are not important. It is the music that is important. That means that almost any French composer was better than any German Romantic composer. He also liked Stravinsky a lot….” Juriaan was influential in introducing Louis to American jazz of the 1940s and 50s, especially the music of and . As Andriessen readily admits: “I must say that what was the most influential on my music, when I look back now, was the big‐band culture: the writing, settings, arrangements, the harmonies of large groups of brass instruments. It all came from Stan Kenton, Dizzy Gillespie, and others.” Additional influences on the development of his unique compositional style were at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, and , with whom he studied for two years; Andriessen also professes an admiration of Maurice Ravel, whom he believes to be the first truly avant‐garde composer; for Bach, whose keyboard works he still practices daily; for , with whom he “shares a fascination of harmony;” and for Stravinsky, who is his guru. Beginning in the 1970s, Andriessen began to accept minimalism as an important influence, incorporating aspects into his style for both political and aesthetic reasons. Andriessen, however, does not believe his music sounds much like American minimalism: “It has not the cosmic sound of those pieces which Reich and Glass wrote at the same time. What is different from my music is that in America there is not enough angst! I’m much more aggressive, I would say.”

In 1971, together with his friend jazz saxophonist , Andriessen assembled a band of nine musicians (three , three trumpets, and three )— some of whom were jazz players, some of whom were classical players—who were committed explicitly to redefining the role of musical performance in socio‐cultural terms; as Andriessen wrote at the time, the group was trying to “uncover the relationships between the conception of music (phase 1, the composer), the production of music (phase 2, the performing musicians), and the consumption of music (phase 3, the listeners) and to change them.” These were musicians who were protesting the Vietnam War, capitalism, and the commodification of music; they believed that music could change the world (or at least be a part of the process), and so they sought to create musical experiences that would point to a different conception of society. Andriessen is fond of labeling the project of this group, the Orkest de Volharding, as “de‐hierarchizing,” music; in fact, he intended Volharding to be “an orchestra that vigorously and vociferously breaks with the division between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art”—or, in the words of Tira Gijs, to remove the “ludicrous discrepancy between the two forms of music, jazz and classical.” For the ensemble, Andriessen wrote one of his most overtly political works—Workers Union. Scored for any group of loud instruments playing in rhythmic unison, but with each player improvising her/his individual pitches (according to a contour provided), Workers Union is Andriessen’s attempt to create an idealized sense of a socialist‐democratic society. The sense of “collective unison” that emerges encapsulates Andriessen’s aesthetic of the 70s: no person in the ensemble holds more or privileged knowledge (i.e. no one has “special” access to a totality—a score—that other do not) or has a more “important” (a melody, instead of an accompaniment) role than the others; for Andriessen, the contributions of each member in the ensemble had to be individual, personal, and equally integral to the successful realization of the work.

Andriessen describes his musical style: “From Stravinsky to , from the gamelan to Miles Davis and Stan Kenton, this is all part of my musical language. But one thing is clear: I almost completely shied away from the nineteenth century [Romanticism].” He takes as the ultimate compliment the indictment made by Dutch playwright Karst Woudstra: “That Andriessen is a bloody classicist!” As the epitome of the Hague School (which is characterized as writing loud, aggressive, rhythmically energetic music devoid of all neo‐Romantic sentiment), he has developed a musical language marked by extremes of ritual and masquerade, of monumentality and intimacy, of formal rigor and intuitive empiricism. In recent years, though, Andriessen has begun to write more overtly expressive, charmingly lyric music, such as his La Passione and Passaggiata, written for the performance artist Cristina Zavalloni; while he has spent the better part of his life writing hard‐edged, “objective” music, Louis ironically remarked in 2002: “now that I’ve reached sixty, it is time to enter the nineteenth century.” ***** JOHN ADAMS (b. 1947, Concord, New Hampshire) is one of America's most admired and respected composers. He grew up in a family that saw no boundaries or distinctions between different styles of music; both his parents were active performers musical (his father played clarinet and his mother sang in church choir and local musical theater productions), and they instilled in young John a love of music ranging from Mozart to Benny Goodman, Bach to Broadway show tunes—and it is this wide range of influences that continues to fire Adams’s musical imagination. As Thomas May remarks: "If Adams has become America's most prominent and in some ways most respected composer, it's because he's found his own voice and his own way beyond the unproductive aesthetic skirmishes of recent decades. He's so past the polarizing arguments of whether music should be tonal or not, or should be easily understood or esoteric, or be 'pop'‐sounding or freakishly original." A musician of enormous range and technical command, he has produced works, both operatic and symphonic, that stand out among all contemporary classical music for the depth of their expression, the brilliance of their sound and the profoundly humanist nature of their themes. Known particularly for his operatic works on contemporary subjects (particularly his collaborations with director Peter Sellars, poet‐librettist Alice Goodman, and choreographer Mark Morris: —which received both an Emmy and a Grammy award, and the recording of which was named by Time magazine as “one of the ten most important recordings of the decade”—and the immensely controversial ), he is one of the most frequently performed living composers. Among numerous awards and honors, he won the (1995) and was named “Composer of the Year” by (1997). Revealing his status as, perhaps, the unofficial composer laureate for the U.S., in 2002 Adams was commissioned by the to write a work commemorating the first anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks. His On the Transmigration of Souls received the 2003 , and the Nonesuch recording won a rare “triple crown” at the Grammys, including “Best Classical Recording”, “Best Orchestral Performance”, and “Best Classical Contemporary Composition.”

After studies at Harvard (1965‐71, M.A. 1972) with , , , Harold Shapero and , Adams moved to California, teaching at the San Francisco Conservatory for ten years (1972‐82). When he left the East Coast, Adams made a conscious decision to break away from both the European postwar aesthetic and the American academic avant‐garde of the time; he believed he had to choose between what he calls the Boulez paradigm and the paradigm. As he commented: “I opted to follow Cage because I thought that he at least was genuinely American and utterly original. Furthermore, many of Cage’s philosophical interests like Zen and Buckminster Fuller appealed to me…. What particularly offended me about the European serialists and post‐war composers like Boulez, Stockhausen, and Berio was their absolute deafness to popular music: to rock and to jazz. I just couldn’t believe that somebody could be a composer in the and not want to absorb all of the Dionysian energy and color in the world of pop music and do something with it. I was keenly aware of how the vernacular tradition had been the wellspring for many of the great European composers, from Bach through Brahms and Bartók and Ravel.” He quickly became involved in the Bay Area's thriving new music scene and began to forge associations with local composers and musicians, such as Ingram Marshall. As the conductor of the Conservatory's New Music Ensemble, Adams commissioned and introduced new works by important experimental composers. In 1978 he became new music advisor to the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. With music director Edo de Waart, he created the orchestra’s highly successful and controversial “New and Unusual Music series,” introducing major American and European avant‐garde composers to San Francisco audiences. His collaboration with the orchestra served as the model for the Meet the Composer residency program, through which he was appointed the Symphony's composer‐in‐residence (1982–5). Several of Adams’s landmark orchestral works—that established his reputation on a national scale—were written for and premiered by the San Francisco Symphony, including (1982), and El Dorado (1991), performed by the Symphonic Winds in 2006 and 2008, respectively. ***** Winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his Passion, DAVID LANG (b. 1957) straddles the uptown and downtown worlds of the New York new music scene, according to composer and critic Kyle Gann, more effectively than any other composer. Lang’s music often synthesizes a minimalist aesthetic with a rock sensibility; however, his music tends to be less systematic and rhythmically complex than that of his totalist/postclassical contemporaries, as he tends to opt instead for theatrical gestures in his music. Times music critic Mark Swed capitulates to Lang’s un‐categorizable style, writing: "There is no name yet for this kind of music." Many of Lang’s pieces resemble each other only in the fierce intelligence and clarity of vision that inform their structures. His catalogue is extensive, and his opera, orchestra, chamber and solo works are by turns ominous, ethereal, urgent, hypnotic, unsettling and very emotionally direct. Much of his work seeks to expand the definition of virtuosity in music—even the deceptively simple pieces can be fiendishly difficult to play and require incredible concentration by musicians and audiences alike.

Along with composers Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe, Lang founded Bang on a Can, described by the San Francisco Chronicle as "the country's most important vehicle for contemporary music." Once “only” a one‐day new music festival, Bang on a Can is now a multi‐faceted organization dedicated to commissioning, performing, creating, presenting and recording contemporary music and whose mission is “to expose exciting and innovative music as broadly and accessibly as possible to new audiences worldwide. And through its Summer Festival,”—held at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams every July—“Bang on a Can hopes to bring this energy and passion for innovation to a younger generation of composers and players.”

BILL MORRISON (b. 1965, Chicago), is a New York‐based filmmaker and artist, best known for his experimental collage film Decasia (2002), which was described as "the most widely acclaimed American avant‐garde film of the fin‐de‐siècle" by J. Hoberman of the Village Voice. Over the past fifteen years, Morrison has created a remarkable series of found‐footage films that highlight the ravages of time and decay on the filmed image. These are as much celebrations of the sometimes‐ frightening beauty of decomposing film as laments for vanishing relics of cinema’s origin. Although not drawing exclusively from early cinema, Morrison specializes in this originary epoch of movie history. On the material level, he appreciates the paradoxical fact that nitrate simultaneously offers what he considers the most perfect film image and is also notoriously unstable. Beyond this, he sees the invention of film as the only precisely locatable birth of an art form, one whose inception is not lost in the mists of time but is more or less contemporary with the emergence of modern man. From the decaying body of film, he extrapolates an analogy for the fate of the human mind and body. His films have been screened at festivals, museums and concert halls worldwide, including the Sundance Film Festival, the Orphan film Symposium, The Tate Modern, London, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles. He has been commissioned to create films for some of the most important composers of his time, including John Adams, , Bill Frisell, Michael Gordon, Henryk Gorecki, David Lang, Harry Partch, Steve Reich and Julia Wolfe. Morrison is a Guggenheim fellow and has received the Alpert Award. His work with Ridge Theater has been recognized with two Bessie awards and an Obie Award. In 2003 he was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists program. ***** MICHEL VAN DER AA (b. 1970, Netherlands) is one of Europe’s most sought‐after composers today. For Van der Aa, music is more than organized sound or a structuring of notes. His music has expressive power, combining sounds and scenic images in a play of changing perspectives. Van der Aa’s recent stage works show a successful involvement as a film and stage director as well as composer; as the Financial Times observed: “Van der Aa, stage director and mastermind as well as composer, pushes the boundaries of all of his media. This is the Gesamtkunst of the future.“Van der Aa’s works often include a theatrical element: staging, film and music are seamlessly interwoven. Dramatic personages take on various identities or have an alter ego; musicians on the stage interact with their electronic counterparts on soundtrack or film. The virtual space that emerges works its way into the mind of the audience. Sound, in Van der Aa’s book, is malleable: it can constantly assume other forms, sometimes recognizable, sometimes not. Van der Aa is in fact a playwright in music. His sounds – like real people – can be flexible or stubborn; they either take control or get the short end of the stick; they reinforce or counteract each other, affecting audiences with their expressive power. In applying staging, film images and soundtracks as additional instruments, he effectively extends the vocabulary of his music.

Having completed his training as a recording engineer at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, Michel van der Aa studied composition with , Gilius van Bergeijk and Louis Andriessen. His style, independent in spirit, is characterized by a constructivist approach and the use of rhythm and chords as structural elements. It is strikingly subtle, playful, poetic and transparent but not, however, expressive or melodious in the traditional sense. In 2002 Van der Aa completed a program in film directing at the New York Film Academy. In 2007 he participated in the Theater Director’s Lab, an intensive course in stage direction. He was responsible for the stage direction as well as the conception and creation of the film segments in the operas One and After Life and the music theatre piece The Book of Disquiet.

In 1999 Michel Van der Aa was the first Dutch composer to win the prestigious International Gaudeamus Prize. Subsequent awards include the Matthijs Vermeulen prize (2004), a Siemens Composers Grant (2005), the Charlotte Köhler Prize for his directing work and the interdisciplinary character of his oeuvre (2005), and the Paul (2006). *****

CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862‐1918) is, without question, one of the most significant composers of his time; his harmonic and formal innovations have had a profound influence on generations of composers—Stravinsky wrote, “The musicians of my generation and I owe the MOST to Debussy,” Bartók described him as “the greatest composer of our time,” and Virgil Thomson wrote, “Debussy is to our century everywhere what Beethoven was to those of the 19th century: our blinding light, our sun, our central luminary.” Paul Griffiths wrote in his book Modern Music: A Concise History:

If modern music may be said to have had a definite beginning, then it started with [a] flute melody, the opening of Prélude à “L’après‐midi d’un faune” by Claude Debussy…[He] opened the paths of modern music—the abandonment of traditional tonality, the development of new rhythmic complexity, the recognition of colour as an essential, the creation of a quite new form for each work, the exploration of deeper mental processes.

Debussy once remarked “J’aime presque autant les images que la musique,” (“I love pictures almost as much as music”), a statement echoed by his Louis Laloy, his first French biographer who remarked in 1909 that Debussy “received his most profitable lessons from poets and painters, not from musicians.” Debussy is often concerned a musical Impressionist, but he found that label imbecilic, instead preferring to align himself with the Symbolist poets of his day.

"The primary aim of French music," Claude Debussy wrote in 1904, "is to give pleasure." Debussy, more than anything, was interested in the sensuous quality of music. Even as a student he let his concept of sound override many of the rules he was so assiduously taught by his teachers (much to their consternation). From this he developed a style that was wholly his own, but that also owed much to a wide variety of disparate influences. As he remarked: “I am more and more convinced that music is not, in essence, a thing which can be cast into a traditional and fixed form. It is made up of colors and rhythms…. [Music] is a dream from which the veils have been lifted. It’s not even the expression of a feeling, it’s the feeling itself.” ***** I strive to write music that leaps off the stage (or reaches out of the speakers) to grab you by the collar and pull you in. Whether through a relentless eruption of energy, or the intensity of quiet contemplation, I want my music to give you no choice, and no other desire, but to listen.

STEVEN BRYANT (b. 1972, Little Rock, AR) is an active composer and conductor with a varied catalog, including works for wind ensemble, orchestra, electronic and electro‐acoustic creations, , and music for the web. Steven's music has been performed by numerous ensembles across North America, Europe, and East Asia. He is a two‐time winner of the National Band Association's William D. Revelli Composition Award: in 2007 for his work Radiant Joy, and in 2008 for Suite Dreams. His first orchestral work, Loose Id, hailed by celebrated composer Samuel Adler as "orchestrated like a virtuoso," was premiered by The Juilliard Symphony and is featured on a CD release by the Bowling Green Philharmonia on Albany Records. Alchemy in Silent Spaces, a new large‐scale work commissioned by James DePreist and The was premiered by the Juilliard Orchestra in May 2006. Other notable commissions have come from the Amherst Saxophone Quartet (funded by the American Composers Jerome Composers Commissioning Program), the Indiana University Wind Ensemble, the US Air Force Band of Mid‐America, the Calgary Stampede Band, and the University of Nevada Las Vegas Wind Orchestra. Steven has also created a recomposition of the Iggy Pop and the Stooges song, "Real Cool Time," for the independent Italian , Snowdonia, as well as music for portions of the Virtual Space Tour at space.com.

Steven is a founding member of the composer‐consortium BCM International: four stylistically‐ diverse composers from across the country, dedicated to enriching the repertoire with exciting works for mediums often mired in static formulas. BCM's music has generated a following of champions around the world, several thousand fans in an active online community, and two recordings: "BCM Saves the World" (2002, Mark Custom Records) and "BCM Men of Industry" (2004, BCM Records). Steven studied composition with at The Juilliard School, Cindy McTee at the University of North Texas, and Francis McBeth at Ouachita University. He resides in Durham, North Carolina.