Beasts Beasts
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sic | David Hoose Mu , c w ond Ne uc e to ag r Beasts ll | o El C iz Martin Brody a b e t h K e u s c Acknowledgments h , Recorded at St. Mary of the Hills Church, Milton, Milton, s o Massachusetts and Rogers Center for the Arts at Merrimack p r a College in North Andover, Massachusetts — March 20, 26 n o and April, 24, 2006. Beasts | Martin Brody o Recording Engineer: Joel Gordon n a Recording Production: Joel Gordon & Martin Brody r p o s - Cover image: “A Wild Cat,” Zakariya ibn Muhammed o z Qazwini, 13th c., ‘Aja’ib al-makhluqat (Wonders of creation), z e 18th . ms., the Walters Collection m l, a ll Photo of Pamela Dellal: Kate L Photography e D a el Martin Brody’s music is available from the composer. m Pa | Ja ano nice opr WWW.ALBANYRECORDS.COM Felty, ezzo-s TROY1595 ALBANY RECORDS U.S. m 915 BROADWAY, ALBANY, NY 12207 TEL: 518.436.8814 FAX: 518.436.0643 ALBANY RECORDS U.K. BOX 137, KENDAL, CUMBRIA LA8 0XD TEL: 01539 824008 © 2015 ALBANY RECORDS MADE IN THE USA DDD WARNING: COPYRIGHT SUBSISTS IN ALL RECORDINGS ISSUED UNDER THIS LABEL. Collage New Music Performs Martin Brody Martin Brody TROY1595 Beasts 1 Refrain [1:28] 2 The Octopus [4:49] 3 Refrain [1:27] 4 A Noiseless Patient Spider [3:16] 5 Beasts [6:02] Elizabeth Keusch, soprano Collage New Music David Hoose, conductor Millennium Sightings 6 Trina Voce [3:36] Collage New Music 7 Zechariahu, the Deliverer [3:55] David Hoose, musical director 8 Solitude [8:04] Frank Epstein, founder Janice Felty, mezzo-soprano flute bass Collage New Music Christopher Kreuger, * James Orleans, ‡ David Hoose, conductor Jessi Rosinski, flute‡ Benjamin Levy, bass* Peggy Pearson, oboe*‡# Anne Hobson Pilot, harp*‡ Tree of Life Robert Annis, clarinet‡ Donald Berman, piano* 9 Part 1 [15:22] Steven Jackson, clarinet* Christopher Oldfather, piano‡ 10 Part 2 [9:53] Catherine French, violin‡# Frank Epstein, percussion*‡ violin*# percussion* Pamela Dellal, mezzo-soprano Ronan Lefkowitz, Craig McNutt, ‡ Collage New Music Kate Vincent, viola# Anne Black, viola*‡ * Millennium Sightings Joel Moerschel, cello*‡# ‡ Beasts Total Time = 57:59 # Tree of Life WWW.ALBANYRECORDS.COM TROY1595 ALBANY RECORDS U.S. 915 BROADWAY, ALBANY, NY 12207 TROY1595 TEL: 518.436.8814 FAX: 518.436.0643 ALBANY RECORDS U.K. BOX 137, KENDAL, CUMBRIA LA8 0XD TEL: 01539 824008 © 2015 ALBANY RECORDS MADE IN THE USA DDD WARNING: COPYRIGHT SUBSISTS IN ALL RECORDINGS ISSUED UNDER THIS LABEL. Collage New Music Performs Martin Brody The Composer Millennium Sightings Martin Brody is Catherine Mills Davis Professor of Music at Wellesley Reading about the 17th c. mystic, Shabbetai Zevi and his Kabbalah-based, messianic College, where he has been on the faculty since 1979. He served as movement got me interested in setting texts about the millennium--not “our” millennium, Fromm Resident in Musical Composition at the American Academy which was then rapidly approaching, but rather other millenarian moments, when someone in Rome in 2001, and he returned to the Academy as Andrew Heiskell or other declared a new age, the end of the world as we know it, an alternative year zero. Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome from 2007-10. He There were many possibilities. I settled on Joachim of Fiore, a 12th-century. Italian has received various awards for his work, among them the Academy- monk who declared that the Third Age, the age of the Holy Spirit and the “Sabbath of Institute Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim mankind” would begin in the year the Christian calendar calls 1284 A.D. A utopian Fellowship, several commissions from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Fromm socialist before his time, Joachim developed a detailed concordance of the Old and New Residency at the William Walton Estate in Ischia and the Roger Sessions Fellowship at Testaments, organized by complicated numerological formulations, and a dramatic vision the Liguria Arts and Humanities Center in Bogliasco. He has also written extensively of the apocalypse and the impending new age. For contrast, I turned to an excerpt from the about post-war American music and serves on the editorial boards of Perspectives of New nervous, apocalyptic writing of Abraham Abulafia, a 13th-century Kabbalist. Abulafia, who Music and The Open Space. An active advocate of modern and contemporary music, he is developed a system for meditating on the letters of the Hebrew alphabet as a technique for currently serving as President of the Stefan Wolpe Society. achieving visionary trances, compared his “science” of alphabet combinations with music. In contrast to Joachim and Abulafia, both obsessed with finding a key to unlock the secrets of history, Miraji tells us to chill out, stop counting, and attend to the flow of time The Music and immediate experience. I tried to find musical parallels to the poem’s calm recycling and elaboration of images while letting the narrator’s spiritual epiphany speak for itself. Beasts Millennium Sightings is dedicated to the memory of Earl Kim. The three pieces presented here explore a common premise: imaginative identification with something or someone outside one’s self as a catalyst of self-transformation. In Beasts, it’s identification with animals—a spider casting its web, a werewolf’s “painful change,” Tree of Life an octopus staring back from the other side of an aquarium. I arranged the poems in this Tree of Life is a setting of poems by Richard Wilbur, John Ashbery, Robert Lowell, and set to suggest an initial resistance and gradual surrender to human/animal identification. James Merrill, interspersed with fragments of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Each of its texts A fragment of Richard Wilbur’s beautiful poem, “Beasts,” provides the language for a deals with the relation between a person and the natural world while touching on a range ritornello, which occurs twice before the poem is completed in the final song. Wilbur’s of themes—alienation, mortality, and human wastefulness. I have ordered the poems to werewolf appears, only in the fifth section, after an uncanny glimpse of James Merrill’s suggest an increasing identification with the natural world—ultimately in the ‘dust unto octopus and an encounter with Walt Whitman’s metaphysical spider. Beasts was dust’ sense. Although each song is complete, the music flows continuously, with cyclic commissioned by the Paul Buttonwieser Fund for New Music and is dedicated to the elements returning throughout in new contexts. memory of Clara Claiborne Park. Beasts and Millennium Sightings were commissioned and premiered by Collage New Millennium Sightings Music. Tree of Life was commissioned and premiered by Winsor Music. Heartfelt Trina Voce (attr. Joachim of Fiore) gratitude to the musicians and organizations that made this music their own and brought it Trina voce simul cantant inaudita cantica et collaudent regem celi, qui fecit hec omnia. to life. And special thanks to the Aaron Copland Fund for Music and Wellesley College for Trino deo trina turba electorum carmina modulatur et exultat per eterna secula. making this recording possible. (With triple voice they sing together unheard songs and praise the king of heaven, who has made all things. The triple multitude of the elect sings to the triune god, lifting up its The Texts songs throughout eternity.) Beasts (Richard Wilbur) Unable to obtain reprint permission. Zechariahu the Deliverer (from Abraham Abulafia, Book of the Letter, transl. Jack Hirschman) See http://werewolf-news.com/2009/06/beasts-by-richard-wilbur/ This is the day of annunciation and Zechariahu the Deliverer rides on a cloud heavily laden with dew—thin dew with light shining through. His mount is a chariot of The Octopus (James Merrill) fire, his horses stallions of air, his servants fiery animals talking fire and clouds around the Unable to obtain reprint permission. mountains of mountains. See http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/merrill/upward.html …and the breath of deliverance storms over the land in his flight, law and word renew his heart which he writes in flaming script out of a flaming pen’s power—fearful and awesome A Noiseless, Patient Spider (Walt Whitman) ink irrigating the land, licking the dryplaces, wringing from the dry places the bow and A noiseless patient spider, arrow of Torah, which will split the sky in two… I mark’d where, on a little promonotory, it stood isolated; and it’s a high wind the wind of God, it is life rousing the wise at heart to the voice of Mark’d how to explore the vacant, vast surrounding, YDVD standing in sheer enlightenment; It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself; adhere to and swear in his name. Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them. And you, O my Soul, where you stand, Solitude (Miraji, trans. Geeta Patel) Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space, Time isn’t evil Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing--seeking the spheres, to connect them; it’s only the easy wash of a river. Till the bridge you will need be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold; This much I can say: I am neither evil, nor am I time I’m not even the easy river’s wash Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul. Though I cannot speak of time, this much I can say everyone who lives alone lives in death’s haunting Evil, good, time, a river--these are the things crowding eternity’s home I live not in any home, isolated, solitary a stranger The houses, these jungles, these flowing paths and rivers From Metamorphoses (Daphne) (Ovid) these mountains, tall buildings seen suddenly desolate tombs and a mosque caretaker ..