CAL PERFORMANCES PRESENTS Saturday, January 26, 2013, 8pm Hertz Hall Eco Ensemble David Milnes, conductor PROGRAM Harrison Birtwistle (b. 1934) Secret Theatre (1984) flute, piccolo Tod Brody percussion Loren Mach oboe Kyle Bruckmann piano Ann Yi clarinet Bill Kalinkos violin 1 Antoine van Dongen bassoon, contrabassoon David Granger violin 2 Dan Flanagan trumpet Brad Hogarth viola Ellen Ruth Rose horn Alicia Telford cello Felix Fan trombone Hall Goff double bass Richard Worn INTERMISSION Ivan Fedele (b. 1953) La Chute de la Maison Usher (1995) Music for the film of the same name by Jean Epstein (1928) soprano Ann Moss harp Naomi Hoffmeyer flute, alto flute, piccolo Stacey Pelinka piano Ann Yi oboe Kyle Bruckmann violin 1 Antoine van Dongen clarinet 1 Bill Kalinkos violin 2 Dan Flanagan clarinet 2, bass clarinet Peter Josheff viola Ellen Ruth Rose bassoon David Granger cello Felix Fan horn Alicia Telford double bass Richard Worn percussion Loren Mach Cal Performances’ 2012–2013 season is sponsored by Wells Fargo. CAL PERFORMANCES 5 PROGRAM NOTES PROGRAM NOTES Harrison Birtwistle (b. 1934) Manchester College of Music in the early 1950s premiered at the 1968 Aldeburgh Festival, it in- tend to unfold, as biographer Michael Hall has Secret Theatre (1984) where he joined with composers Alexander corporates all the music of Tragoedia, setting it pointed out, “in one long continuous move- Goehr and Peter Maxwell Davies to found the in a kaleidoscopic array of more than one hun- ment…structured so as to gradually bring into Shortly before his 75th birthday, composer New Music Manchester Group—a seminal en- dred short numbers (arias, chorales, dances, sce- the foreground something that had originally Harrison Birtwistle (Sir Harrison to his fans, semble for the performance of new music out- nic music, and so forth). been in the background.” In the case of Secret Harry to his friends) explained to his inter- side of London. Only later did Birtwistle’s com- While his later operatic works—Yan Tan Theatre, this general principle holds, but there locutor Andrew Clark of the Financial Times: positional talent gain the upper hand, with the Tethera (1986), Gawain (1991), and The Second is also a loosely episodic element of exchange at “Writing music is the only thing I do.... I get ill Refrains and Choruses (1957) for wind quintet. It Mrs Kong (1994)—are more conventionally nar- play, according to which no single melodic ut- if I don’t work. I’ve always felt there was a music is apparently apocryphal that he sold his clari- rative in structure, the episodic and stylized terance or ostinato figure holds sway for very in my head that didn’t exist, and it’s still there. nets immediately after this work was chosen for manner of Punch and Judy laid the ground work long. Occasionally an ostinato pattern will blos- Thank God for that—it seems to be a permanent inclusion at the 1959 Cheltenham Festival, but for what is widely considered Birtwistle’s mas- som into tunefulness; more often a melodic line thing.” As Britain’s preeminent exponent of the by the early 1960s, he was identifying himself terpiece, The Mask of Orpheus, commissioned by will disintegrate into a stuttering shadow of its modernist traditions exemplified by the likes primarily as a composer. Even today, however, Covent Garden in 1970 but produced instead former self. In this shifting of roles lies the “se- of Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Edgard the impact of his years as a clarinetist can be (after a long hiatus) by English National Opera cret” of the score. Varèse, and Olivier Messiaen, Birtwistle can heard in his preference for woodwind and brass in 1986. Together with six interludes of elec- Before he began composing, Birtwistle set reckon his musical gift as both lasting and con- timbres and his predominantly melodic or con- tronic music realized at IRCAM (the Institut down on paper some 66 pages representing his tinually in progress. Summing up his achieve- trapuntal writing; instead of gravitating toward de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/ thoughts about Secret Theatre. Unusually—in ments, biographer Jonathan Cross observes: chords or keyboard figurations, Birtwistle’s Musique in Paris), The Mask of Orpheus is pre- fact, uniquely—excerpts from these “jottings” “Like Stravinsky, like Cézanne, Birtwistle’s art muse typically sings in long-breathed lines. His sented in 126 vignettes, grouped in threes, re- were included in the program notes at the pre- is generally concerned with the universal rather melodies gain some of their expansive quality flecting or refracting the Orpheus myth through miere: “divide the ensemble maybe in perfor- than the particular, with the collective rather from his frequent reliance on a wedge-shaped a triple perspective: Man/Woman (performed mance…important. Maybe the instruments that than the individual, with landscape rather than pattern of intervals (widening symmetrically by a singer), Hero/Heroine (performed by a make up the horizontal element could change portrait. Hence his preoccupation with myth outward from a focal pitch)—though this ba- mime), and Myth itself (performed by a giant during the performance (beware, not too much and ritual, with formal theater and stylized dra- sic shape is often subjected to systematic al- singing puppet). coming and going)…maybe they could stand? ma.... And hence his obsession with simple mu- terations, such that the original contour of the Given Birtwistle’s interest in drama and Perhaps?” The composer mused: “If the instru- sical structures—such as verse-refrain forms— wedge is sometimes inaudible. ritual, it is not surprising that his instrumental ments of the cantus are going to change during and with the very basics of musical language— Although Birtwistle made a relatively clean works, too, partake of the theater—often as- the course of the piece, and there are to be solos pulse, melody, repetition, variation.” break between his performing career and his signing to an instrument or group of players a in the continuum then some sort of instrumen- On the one hand, Birtwistle has produced composing career, his years as a musical dra- particular function in the “narrative” of a piece tal role playing is implied—this is interesting… a corpus of works remarkably unified by a few matist have been thoroughly intertwined with and sometimes choreographing the movement important do not precompose the idea of role trademark preoccupations: layered or stratified the development of his compositional aesthetic. of the performers. In Secret Theatre, the players playing, let any logic in that direction come out textures, an idiosyncratic approach to melodic From 1975 to 1982, he wrote a great deal of inci- form two distinct groups—the “cantus” and the of the composed context—it should make a sort writing often featuring angular melodies, a pref- dental music, serving as music director and then “continuum.” The cantus group stands and sings of hidden drama on an independent level.... Like erence for mechanical or ostinato patterning, associate director of London’s National Theatre, out a lyrical melody, spun like spider’s silk and a secret theater....” and a highly intuitive approach to form. On an appointment that resulted from his already usually in unison or near unison; by contrast the Having already set down these ideas in his the other hand, Birtwistle’s work has evolved established dramatic credentials, including seated continuum is devoted to various inter- notebook, Birtwistle then encountered Robert through what Cross calls “distinct periods participation in the Pierrot Players, which pre- locking repeated patterns or ostinatos. Though Graves’s poem “Secret Theater” with its pregnant concentrating (in very general terms) on vio- miered his Monodrama in 1967. Another of his individual instruments may move from cantus lines about music as a herald of dreams. It was a lent, formalist oppositions in the 1960s, lyrical early successes bears the title Tragoedia (1965) to continuum and back, the primary cantus perfect fit. Indeed, as Hall points out, the “essen- processionals in the 1970s, and an exploration and, in the composer’s words, it concerns itself instruments are the predictably melodic ones: tially rhythmic” nature of the ostinato patterns of the basics of rhythm, melody and gesture in with “the ritual and formal aspects of Greek flute, oboe, clarinet, and two violins, with horn yields a music that is “dance-like and intensely the 1980s.” In fact all three of these key features tragedy rather than with the content of a specific and trumpet occasionally chiming in. By con- alive”: “Listeners may find it hard to believe that leave their traces on the music we will hear to- play.” This interest in archetypal or folk drama, trast, the continuum group works like an intri- Robert Graves’s injunction to ‘boldly ring down night: Secret Theatre (1984). rather than in the psychological development cately cogged clock, fully worthy of attention in the curtain, then dance out our love’ was not in Birtwistle’s quip that composing was his of a particular dramatic situation, carries over its own right. Birtwistle’s mind from the beginning.” “only” occupation must be taken with a grain into Birtwistle’s stage works, including Punch While Birtwistle’s actual stage works are Secret Theatre was commissioned by the of salt. First, he was a clarinetist, and a fine and Judy. Completed at Princeton University characterized by their atomization into tiny London Sinfonietta for a concert commemo- one at that, earning