Jeffrey Milarsky, Conductor
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Thursday Evening, April 18, 2019, at 7:30 The Juilliard School presents AXIOM Jeffrey Milarsky, Conductor IANNIS XENAKIS (1922–2001) Okho (1989) BENJAMIN CORNAVACA, LEO SIMON, JOSEPH BRICKER, Djembe CAROLINE SHAW (b. 1982) Entr’acte AMELIA DIETRICH, EMMA FRUCHT, Violins EMILY LIU, Viola CLARE BRADFORD, Cello Intermission STEVE REICH (b. 1936) Tehillim (1981) MELLISSA HUGHES, Lyric Soprano NINA FAIA MUTLU, Lyric Soprano KIRSTEN SOLLEK, Alto ELIZABETH BATES, High Soprano Performance time: Approximately 1 hour and 15 minutes, including an intermission The taking of photographs and the use of recording equipment are not permitted in this auditorium. Information regarding gifts to the school may be obtained from the Juilliard School Development Office, 60 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY 10023-6588; (212) 799-5000, ext. 278 (juilliard.edu/giving). Alice Tully Hall Please make certain that all electronic devices are turned off during the performance. Percussion music held an important posi- Notes on the Program tion in Xenakis’ oeuvre, possibly because, by Matthew Mendez as Steven Schick suggests, the same tension between the “logical and myth- Okho ological, mechanical and intuitive” that IANNIS XENAKIS drove his style has long been inherent to Born May 29, 1922, in Bra˘ ila, Romania the percussion medium, and to compos- Died February 4, 2001, in Paris, France ers’ attempts to come to grips with it. Written in 1989 near the end of Xenakis’ One of the few genuinely sui generis fig- career, Okho typifies these dynamics writ small. Its basic conceit emerged during a ures in the pantheon of 20th-century com- visit to the studio of the commissioning position, Iannis Xenakis always took a path ensemble, Trio Le Cercle, where Xenakis apart in music—inescapably so, perhaps, was attracted by a djembe, a distinctive given the fateful events that marked his goblet-shaped hand drum of West Afri- early life. Just a teenager when Mussolini’s can extraction; he was so inspired by it troops invaded Greece, where he had spent that he decided to fashion the piece as much of his life, Xenakis quickly joined the a study of the instrument’s unique capa- anti-fascist resistance, with wide-ranging bilities. Each of Okho’s three percussion- personal consequences: not only was he ists would therefore perform on his own nearly killed in guerilla combat, but follow- djembe, with the sonority thus produced ing the end of hostilities, in 1947, he found merging at times into a kind of composite, himself a wanted man by the nation’s new “hyper”-djembe. Though the score, as was long Xenakis’ wont, was constructed right-wing authorities, who had marked using a number of mathematical organiza- him for death for his wartime involvement tional schemes, these are but the arma- with the Communist-led partisan struggle. tures atop which he distributes the full Forced into exile, he fled to France, where panoply of sounds the instrument can he would spend the rest of his life. With all make, including novel effects like knuckle the intensity and commitment of one who rolls. The one non-djembe sound, pro- has looked death straight in the eye, he duced by a grosse peau profonde (“a large, now devoted himself to an extraordinary, deep drumhead”), makes its initial appear- double professional trajectory: Trained in ance around the piece’s halfway point—like engineering, and deeply conversant with a voice of fate irrevocably conjured up by higher mathematics, Xenakis established the thrum of Okho’s djembes. an active career as an architect, which in turn influenced his composing. Indeed, Entr’acte with its characteristic swarming instru- CAROLINE SHAW mental “masses,” Xenakis’ brutally stark, Born in 1982 in Greenville, North Carolina almost monolithic musical idiom has often been portrayed as a kind of translation into The surprise recipient of the 2013 Pulitzer sound of some of the volumetric, sculp- Prize, awarded while she was still enrolled tural principles that animated his architec- as a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, tural practice. At the same time, a visceral, Juilliard Creative Associate Caroline Shaw almost “plastic” rhythmic sensibility very has become one of the most sought-after often manifested itself in Xenakis’ music, composers of her young generation, in de- and it has been taken as a nod to the ritual mand by venturesome orchestras and the character of the ancient Greek dramatic rapper-producer Kanye West alike, the latter art he so cherished. of whom has been a regular collaborator in recent years. Maintaining an active parallel slide would come to accrue connotations career as a singer and violinist, Shaw has of inwardness and intimacy of expression, never been shy about the impact of those and of idyllic “otherness.” Hence Shaw’s activities on her composing, and it is her description of what she finds so poignant history with the string repertoire she grew in the Op. 77, No. 2 trio—the way it “sud- up deeply immersed in—favorite works by denly takes you to the other side of Alice’s the likes of Mozart and Brahms—that has looking glass, in a kind of absurd, subtle, so often been, as it were, the “subject” of technicolor transition.” her own music. She characterizes it as a kind of The title works as a play on words: “Entr’acte” is a near-homophone of “in- classical music fan fiction, revisiting this teract,” and in this sense, it can be under- older music that a lot of us really love, I stood as nodding at the values of collective think, very sincerely. It’s not in a kitschy interaction so often associated with string or ironic way, like “I’m going to decon- quartet playing, and which have made this a struct this little thing, because isn’t that source of attraction for performers and au- silly and old so let’s undermine these diences alike ever since Haydn. Yet Shaw’s systems … ” These are things that I piece clearly invokes the familiar meaning grew up with and really love. of the word “entr’acte,” as well—as a mu- sical parenthesis between the acts of a dra- Shaw’s metaphor, fan fiction (original narra- matic or balletic presentation. As such, the tives written by enthusiasts of fantasy and title seems also to draw the listener’s atten- science fiction franchises, produced in the tion to that which is not intended to be the spirit of vicarious further engagement with main attraction, but which ends up as the their characters), is entirely representative: principal object of focus, anyway: the “trio” It has the same balance of whimsy and se- nominally offered to cast the “minuet” in riousness of purpose that is also her mu- relief. Hence Entr’acte is structured as a sic’s distinctive trademark. series of episodic flights of fancy—from coy, plucked choreographies to games of In her student days, Shaw was an avid imitative violin hopscotching—sandwiched player of string quartets, and the medium between a poignant theme constructed us- is often her compositional vehicle. Her ing quasi-classical syntax. Yet on its return, second essay for the line-up, Entr’acte, is that poignant “minuet” theme (which had quintessential Shaw in its impetus, taking audibly “dissolved,” as if scrubbed away, a very precise detail in a familiar piece—or during its first appearance) proves unable more exactly, her own personalized expe- to keep the quizzical sounds from the other rience with that detail—as the occasion to side of the looking glass contained: After weave an unexpected web of resonances the violins fade away, the cellist is left and charged cross-references. In this case, alone to offer a questioning, non sequitur the inspiration was the minuet—in par- pizzicato coda, as if, remarks Shaw, “recall- ticular, its contrasting trio—from Joseph ing fragments of an old tune or story.” Haydn’s last completed string quartet, his Op. 77, No. 2 in F major. The trio takes place Shaw’s knack for imbuing familiar sounds in the distant key of the flat submediant, with all the freshness of a new encounter a maneuver more commonly associated was recently recognized by the producers with Haydn’s successors, Beethoven and of the television program Mozart in the Schubert: In their hands, this particular tonal Jungle, when Entr’acte—along with Shaw herself, in a cameo role—was featured on- that my own extremely ancient tradition was screen in a 2018 episode. one that I had lost touch with.” Determined to rectify this, Reich took a course in biblical Tehillim Hebrew, which quickly led him to the study STEVE REICH of cantillation—the codified procedures used Born October 3, 1936, in New York City to chant scripture during the Hebrew liturgy. Soon enough, subtle traces of the construc- “How small a thought it takes to fill a whole tive thinking characteristic of cantillation were life!” It would be hard to sum up the career finding their way into Reich’s music, while a of American master composer Steve Reich more overt marker of his rapprochement (’61, composition) more succinctly than with his Jewish roots would come in 1981’s with these words, taken from an apho- Tehillim (Hebrew for “Psalms,” or literally, rism by his favorite philosopher, Ludwig “praises”), which proved a turning point in Wittgenstein, and set to music by him, in a his career. mood of autobiographical self-reflection, in his 1995 piece Proverb. After all, for more Though Reich actually abandoned his en- than half a century, Reich has been pursu- gagement with the structural principles of ing the ramifications of just such “small cantillation in it, Tehillim was a watershed thoughts”—for example, with his early for a variety of reasons: For one, it was discovery of desynchronized tape loops, his first text setting since his apprentice- which led to his technique of instrumen- ship years; likewise, it contained the first tal “phasing” and, eventually, a wholly true slow movement he had written since personalized yet flexible application of that time; and perhaps most crucially of all, familiar canonic procedures.