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\ SAN FRANCISCO CONTEMPORARY MUSIC PLAYERS David Milnes, Music Director Performers Monday, 25 April 2005 8 pm Tod Brody, flute Yerba Buena Center for the Arts - Forum Emma Moon, flute William Wohlmacher, clarinet A MUSICAL MENAGERIE Carey Bell, clarinet David Schrader, soprano saxophone MASON BATES Roy Malan, violin String Band (2002) Stephen Harrison, cello Julie Steinberg, piano Robin Sharp, violin Stephen Harrison, cello Julie Steinberg, piano Daniel Kennedy, percussion BRIAN FERNEYHOUGH Bone Alphabet (1992) Christopher Froh, percussion Tonight’s concert is made possible in part by a generous grant from the STEPHEN HARTKE Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University. The Horse with the Lavender Eye (1997) I. Music of the Left We thank the Ross McKee Foundation for helping to underwrite tonight’s performances of piano trios by Mason Bates and Stephen Hartke. II. The Servant of Two Masters III. Waltzing at the Abyss IV. Cancel My Rumba Lesson Carey Bell, clarinet Roy Malan, violin Karen Rosenak, piano ~ INTERMISSION ~ GEORGIA SPIROPOULOS Music for 2? (2000) United States Premiere Tod Brody, flute Teresa McCollough, piano SHULAMIT RAN Under the Sun’s Gaze (2004) World Premiere, Commission Program Notes more striking is his idiosyncratic duo for accordion and electronics, Rodeopteryx (1998). Bates links the work’s title to “the element of country and bluegrass that mischievously plays under the work’s sur- MASON BATES (B. 1977) face (hence ‘rodeo’); and...to the lopsided, hybrid nature of the work as something between...concert music and electronica: Archaeopteryx is n a 2004 interview for the Los Angeles Times, Mason Bates the first known hybrid of birds and dinosaurs.” states, “Music, for me, is not a mental exercise, not an abstract Iconstruction. It’s intuitional. It needs to have the power to vis- Given Bates’s multi-faceted musicality, it is not surprising that two of cerally move people and to communicate strongly, across a broad his most successful works also feature him as a performer. Commis- reach.” Indeed the communicative crossing of boundaries is a hall- sioned and premiered by the New Juilliard Ensemble, Sounds for His mark for Bates, who pursues a dual career: composer by day, electron- Animation (2003) involves an orchestral ensemble enlivened by Bates ica artist by night, under the stage name “Masonic.” Together these himself as soloist on the synthesizer, an instrument that Bates roles have given his music a strength and dynamism that is rapidly describes as “blessed with a wonderful identity crisis [that] shatters the bringing him to the attention of audiences in California and around conventional relationship between orchestra and soloist.” Complete the world. with such movement titles as “Whalesong of the Microjungle” and “Ecstasy of the Machine,” Sounds for His Animation showcases the After studying piano with Hope Armstrong Erb and composition “chameleon-like” possibilities of this “schizophrenic” instrument. with musicologist and punk rocker Dika Newlin, Bates moved from Bates was in the percussion section performing on drum machine Viriginia to New York City and began a rigorous educational pro- when his Omnivorous Furniture, for “sinfonietta and electronica,” was gram. Not content merely to major in composition at Juilliard (where premiered in 2004 as part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green his teachers included John Corigliano, David Del Tredici, and Samuel Umbrella Series at Walt Disney Hall. Here, Bates explores the idea of Adler), he also earned a degree for his work in American and what he calls “‘omnivorous moments,’ when material previously per- medieval English literature. In his copious spare time, he was also ceived as background—the wallpaper or ‘furniture’ surrounding the discovering the city’s ‘underground’ music scene, where he found “a foreground material ultimately consumes the entire texture.” highly informed audience listening to richly textured electronic music,” according to a 2003 interview with Mark Gresham. Although Bates is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in composition with Edmund the electronic avant-garde may seem far removed from the classical, Campion at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has also Bates notes: “I find this side of my musical life merging rather star- worked with Jorge Liderman. At age twenty-eight, he has already tlingly with my activities in the concert music world. The possibility composed numerous commissioned works and (as Masonic) has of an unlimited sound palette, comprised almost entirely of home- appeared at venues ranging from 111 Minna in San Francisco to made sounds fashioned in my studio, fascinates me as a composer— Metaverso in Rome (where he spent 2003-04 sponsored by the as well as the possibility of interacting with different kinds of spaces.” American Academy in Rome) and Berlin’s Kinzo Club and Zu Mir. Bates has won fellowships from Tanglewood and the American Even Bates's purely ‘classical’ works have tended to mix genres or Academy of Arts and Letters, has been a Composer in Residence for build bridges between diverse styles. For example, his Icarian Rhapsody Young Concert Artists, and has won the Aspen Festival’s Jacob for string orchestra, which was premiered by the Oakland Symphony Druckman Memorial Prize. His From Amber Frozen (2004) was com- under Michael Morgan in 2003, seems to combine modernism and missioned by the Naumberg Foundation for the Biava Quartet and minimalism in a melange that San Francisco Chronicle critic Joshua premiered at Alice Tully Hall; and his orchestral Ode, written for the Kosman has called “lovely to hear and ingeniously constructed.” Still Phoenix Symphony was later performed at the Spoleto Festival USA 4 5 and honored with the ASCAP Morton Gould Award. Bates is cur- rently completing a work for organ and electronica (commissioned in BRIAN FERNEYHOUGH (B. 1943) celebration of Juilliard’s centennial) while living in Germany as recipi- ent of the 2004-05 Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin. t the close of a lengthy 1996 interview, Joshua Cody, director of Ensemble Sospeso, posed a surprising question to Brian String Band (2002) AFerneyhough, British composer and long-time California resi- dent best known as a godfather of the so-called “New Complexity” for violin, cello, and prepared piano movement. When asked about his definition of beauty, Ferneyhough responded, revealing both his problematic relationship to convention- Describing the origin of his String Band, Bates writes, “Sandwiched al aesthetic categories and his deeply felt, almost religious approach to between my burgeoning shelf of electronica vinyl and an admittedly music-making. “No unified answer, I'm afraid,” the composer more modest stack of bargain-bin classical LPs, I have in my record replied, “I suppose ultimately, I find beautiful whatever stimulates, collection a few dozen albums of old-time string-band music. The brings forth positive inner turmoil, makes me feel momentarily more covers show ecstatically happy groups of country musicians crowded intelligent, spiritual, etc., than I otherwise am: transmits a breath of together and clutching the tools of their trade: fiddles, guitars, man- Luft vom anderen Planeten (air from other planets).” This fragment dolins, banjos, a string bass. The breakneck, instrumental picking on of Stefan George’s is best known to musicians as part of the text for the records is even more lively than the looks on their faces, and Arnold Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet (with soprano, 1908), but somewhere in that soulful, earthy music I found a space to begin it also resonates within Ferneyhough’s own oeuvre—not just because String Band. of the Schoenbergian overtones, but also because so many of his pieces seem ‘otherworldly’ in their extraordinary structural intricacy “Those who are aware of old-time string-band music might hear a and in the demands that they make upon performers. twangy resemblance to the work’s opening material, but the work rap- idly evolves away from this music and into other spaces. A unison Ferneyhough forged his reputation rapidly. After studying with that slowly bleeds lower, made more effective by the use of pencil Lennox Berkeley at the Royal Academy of Music, he received a erasers and small screws inserted in the piano, grows into bluesy, slid- Mendelssohn scholarship that enabled him to travel to Amsterdam ing half-steps. This ultimately flowers, in the middle of the work, into (where he worked briefly with Ton de Leeuw) and funding from the a long melody framed by bent notes—but at that moment the piece City of Basel for a somewhat longer period of study with Klaus begins to disintegrate. With the pitch world fractured and the grooves Huber. By the time he joined Huber at the Staatliche Hochschule für of the beginning now fading into the chemical sunset, the last half of Musik in Freiburg in 1971, he had already won three Gaudeamus the piece shows the ensemble as a very different kind of string band. Music Week Prizes, in three consecutive years, for his Sonatas for It is a unified band of resonating strings, with the melody regressing String Quartet (1968), his orchestral Epicycle (1968), and the Missa back to its original space of a bleeding unison.” Brevis (1969). Fortunately, he was also winning the support of some of Europe’s finest instrumentalists; without their expertise, the sheer String Band is dedicated to Edmund Campion, whose Outside Music the difficulty of Ferneyhough’s music might have become a significant San Francisco Contemporary Music Players premiered last month. obstacle to its dissemination. According to musicologist Richard Toop (an authority on the postwar European avant-garde), “there are no easy Ferneyhough pieces, nor even moderately difficult ones.” 6 7 At the heart of Ferneyhough’s complexity is an intense exploration of cuff I can only suggest that it serves to keep the tenuous lines of time, the limits of human perception and physical ability, and the communication open between different areas of ourselves.” superimposition of musical processes.