0912 BOX Program Notes

THE BOX–music by living composers NotaRiotous Microtonal Voices Saturday, September 12, 2009 About the composers and the music Ben Johnston Johnston began as a traditional composer of art music before working with Harry Partch, helping the senior musician to build instruments and use them in the performance and recording of new compositions. After working with Partch, Johnston studied with Darius Milhaud at Mills College. It was, in fact, Partch himself who arranged for Johnston to study with Milhaud. Johnston, beginning in 1959, was also a student of John Cage, who encouraged him to follow his desires and use traditional instruments rather than electronics or newly built ones. Unskilled in carpentry and finding electronics then unreliable, Johnston struggled with how to integrate microtonality and conventional instruments for ten years, and struggled with how to integrate microtones into his compositional language through a slow process of many stages. However, since 1960 Johnston has used, almost exclusively, a system of microtonal notation based on the rational intervals of just intonation. Other works include the orchestral work Quintet for Groups (commissioned by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra), Sonnets of Desolation (commissioned by the Swingle Singers), the opera Carmilla, the Sonata for Microtonal Piano (1964) and the Suite for Microtonal Piano (1977). Johnston has also completed ten string quartets to date. He has received many honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959, a grant from the National Council on the Arts and Humanities in 1966, and two commissions from the Smithsonian Institution. Johnson taught composition and theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1951 to 1986 before retiring to North Carolina. While at the university he was in contact with such avant-garde figures as John Cage, La Monte Young, and Iannis Xenakis. Johnston's students include Manfred Stahnke, Kyle Gann, Stuart Saunders Smith, Thomas Albert, and Michael Pisaro. He also considers his practice of just intonation to have influenced James Tenney and Larry Polansky. ~ Joseph Maneri (1927-2009) Composer of many groundbreaking twelve-tone and microtonal works, including a piano concerto commissioned by Erich Leinsdorf for the Boston Symphony, Maneri retired in 2007 after more than 35 years of teaching harmony, counterpoint, composition, saxophone, and improvisation at the New England Conservatory of Music. He received an honorary doctorate from that institution this past May in recognition of his enormously varied musical accomplishments, his indelible teaching style, and the many gifted performers who carry on his musical legacy. In 1979, he created at NEC the Microtonal Composition and Performance course, in which students learn to sing, perform, compose, and improvise with microintervals. Maneri was the author (with Scott VanDuyne) of the pioneering textbook, Preliminary Exercises in the Virtual Pitch Continuum (published by the Boston Microtonal Society), a program of ear- training and compositional exercises in 72-note equal temperament. Over the years many students from Maneri’s class have gone on to compose or perform microtonal music in Boston and elsewhere. Overwhelming interest in the NEC class led to the founding of the Boston Microtonal Society in 1988. He was also the co-inventor of a microtonal keyboard that had 588 keys with 72 notes per octave. Maneri received his formal compositional and theoretical training from Josef Schmid (himself a pupil of Alban Berg) between 1946 and 1957 in New York. During this time, Maneri became renowned as a jazz saxophonist; in addition, he was one of New York City’s most sought-after clarinetists, specializing in Greek and Middle Eastern improvisation. His unique voice as both a composer and saxophonist/clarinetist was a strong influence in New York and Boston. In the 1990s, his music became very popular in Europe, where he performed and recorded with the Joe Maneri Quartet for the Leo, ECM, and Hat Hut labels. Osanj (2004), for solo viola, was described by Maneri as a love song to his wife, Sonja. It was composed in “free” 72-note equal temperament. The microtonal accidentals are notated using the symbols developed by Ezra Sims. And Death Shall Have No Dominion was composed in 1977 on a poem by Dylan Thomas which is a pungent meditation on a phrase from the Epistle to the Romans (Rom: 6:9). It is the second piece Maneri wrote that employs microtones, the first being Ephatha for piano, clarinet, trombone, and tuba. A twelve-tone row was employed in the composing process, but many of the vocal pitches are altered by a quarter tone or more. Arrows next to the notes indicate these inflections in the score: an arrow pointing up or down means “a quarter-tone”; a slash mark across the arrow means “a little more”; two slashes mean “still more”; some arrows are crossed by three slashes. ~ James Bergin Bergin is a composer, conductor, and violist. As a private student of Joseph Maneri for more than a decade, he studied harmony, species counterpoint, fugue and composition, using Arnold Schoenberg’s textbooks. He later received a Bachelor's Degree in Music Theory from the New England Conservatory of Music, where he concentrated on the study of microtones and began composing in 72-note equal temperament, with Maneri as his principal teacher. His compositions include tonal and microtonal works for solo instruments, voice and chamber ensemble, chorus, piano, and organ. He will be teaching a winter study course at Williams this coming January entitled “Microtonal Ear-training, Performance, and Composition” using the textbook written by Joseph Maneri. Bergin studied viola with George Neikrug and currently plays with the Berkshire Symphony. Before moving to the Berkshires in 2002, he was active in the new music scene in Boston, performing many new works on the Composers in Red Sneakers series. He has improvised microtonally with Maneri and others. He is the conductor of NotaRiotous, and the executive director of the Boston Microtonal Society. Noli me tangere (2007) was inspired by the New Testament account in the gospel of Matthew of the return of Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary” to the tomb of Christ; the descent of the angel from heaven, his rolling back of the stone from the tomb, and his announcement that Christ had risen from the dead; and by the account in the gospel of John of the appearance of Christ to Mary Magdalene outside the tomb; his speaking her name, causing her to recognize him; and his admonition "Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, 'I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.' " The violin and viola duo portray the feelings of the women and the conversations they might have had on their way to the tomb; the choice of drumset and sax for the angel's announcement is an expression of gratitude for Joe Maneri's life; the cello portrays the words of Christ that Mary had never imagined she would hear. The text for Kyrie is the opening section of the Latin Mass (“Lord, have mercy; Christ, have mercy; Lord, have mercy”). It was begun in 1997, put aside, and completed in 2005. It was originally scored for baritone and viola; after the first performance, the cello part was added to the two existing voices. Tonight’s performance adds an improvised prelude using quick repetitions of the text, extended vocal techniques, and foreshadowing of the melodic and rhythmic material used in the composition. Both pieces are written in 72-note equal temperament, and use the microtonal symbols developed by Ezra Sims. ~ Ezra Sims Sims is known mainly as a composer of microtonal music. He made his professional debut (with his earlier twelve-note music) on a Composers Forum program in New York in 1959. In 1960, he found himself compelled by his ear to begin writing microtonal music, which he has done almost exclusively since then, aside from several years when he made tape music for dancers, musicians at the time being generally even more afraid of microtones than they are now. His music has been performed from Tokyo to Salzburg. Sims has received various awards—a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Koussevitzky commission, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, etc. He has lectured on his music in America and abroad and has published articles on his technique in Computer Music Journal, Perspectives of New Music, and others. With Ted Mook, he designed a font for use with computer printing programs, for his set of accidentals sufficient for 72-note music; it has been widely adopted in the field. Sims was co-founder—with Rodney Lister and Scott Wheeler—of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble, of which he has served as President and as a member of its board of directors. His music is published by Frog Peak Music and Diapason Press, and is available from New World Records. Chase (world premiere) was composed for clarinetist Dianne Hefner. The title comes from the epigraph, taken from Ben Jonson’s “Hymn to Diana,” and the basic idea is a play on the hunt inspired by Dianne’s name (Diana being the goddess of the hunt). ~ Manfred Stahnke Stahnke was born Kiel, Germany. He studied piano, composition, and musicology in Lübeck, Freiburg, Hamburg, and the U.S. His principal composition teachers were Wolfgang Fortner, Klaus Hubert, and György Ligeti. In 1979 he earned his doctorate in Hamburg with Constantin Floros; the subject of his thesis was Pierre Boulez’s Third Piano Sonata. Since the 80s Stahnke has worked intensely with computer-supported techniques. In the U.S. he used computers in 1979 and 1980 to create precise microtonal music.

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