Acknowledgments Scott Lindroth YTTE StEphEn JaffE four piEces QuaSi Sonata YTTE is available from the composer: MiriaM GidEon [email protected]. crEaturE to crEaturE Four Pieces Quasi Sonata and Offering StEphEn JaffE offErinG are published by Theodore Presser Company. Creature to Creature is published by Mobart Music Publications Recorded August 2008, August 2009 and January 2010. Produced and engineered by Judith Sherman Engineering and editing assistant: Jeanne Velonis Cover image: Brian Peterson “Earth and Sky” #18, 2005 (www.brianhpetersonwordimage.com) Support provided by the Duke University Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Elation www.albanyrecords.com TROY1483 albany records u.s. 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 © 2014 albany records made in the usa ddd Laura Gilbert flute Jonathan Bagg viola Daniel Lippel guitar waRning: cOpyrighT subsisTs in all Recordings issued undeR This label. Donald Berman piano Stacey Shames harp Elizabeth Shammash mezzo-soprano Elation is a result of the collaborative cross-relations that exist between the musicians and the composers & the music composers on the disc, and their enthusiasm for each other’s work. Stephen Jaffe’s Offering Scott Lindroth: YTTE was produced in 1993 as a joint commission, for flutist Laura Gilbert’s Auréole Trio and for Scott Lindroth’s work as a composer has centered on instrumental and vocal media, and includes compositions for the Chicago Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, and New York Philharmonic, as well violist Jonathan Bagg’s Mallarmé ensemble. Bagg and Jaffe are colleagues at Duke University, as the Netherlands Wind Ensemble, the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Ensemble, the California E.A.R. Unit, and the Ciompi String Quartet. He has also composed music for dance, theater, and video. which led to Jaffe’s writing Four Pieces Quasi Sonata in 2006. An equal admiration for the He has received awards and fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Koussevitzky Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others. music of Scott Lindroth, also at Duke, led Gilbert and Bagg to commission his trio for the A recording of four chamber works by Lindroth was released on the CRI Emergency Music series in May 1999; other recordings may be found on the CRI and Centaur labels. Since 1990, Lindroth has lived in Mondanock Music festival while they were its directors. This produced Lindroth’s YTTE, in Durham, North Carolina, where he serves on the faculty of Duke University and is Vice Provost for the Arts. 2008. While Miriam Gideon’s playful and probing 1985 Creature to Creature was not written YTTE takes its title from a series of architectural portraits by Achilles Rizzoli (1896-1981). Rizzoli’s title, Y.T.T.E. stands for Yield To Total Elation. For most of his career, Rizzoli toiled as an architectural for these players, it seemed to add a different, powerful voice that was aesthetically consonant draftsman in San Francisco, and in his free time he cultivated a fantastical vision for a world exposi- with the rest of the music on the disc. tion of new architecture consisting of symbolic portraits of his close friends and relatives. A recluse by nature, Rizzoli never shared his work publicly, but since his death he has come to be recognized as an Once born, musical works make their way in the world as individuals. What is usually outsider artist of importance if not influence. As a teacher and administrator by day and a composer by night, I feel some affinity with Rizzoli. forgotten is the human context of their creation, the circumstances that caused the composers Though my music does not evoke the neo-classical stylings of Rizzoli’s Architectural Tectonic Exhibit that included Y.T.T.E., I do seek exaltation in the music I write. I find the veiled and generally softer and musicians to connect. That nexus is preserved here. We hope the elation that surrounded colors of the alto flute, viola, and guitar immensely attractive, and my YTTE taps into the hidden desires of these instruments and offers them a moment to shine. YTTE was commissioned by the this coming together is evoked, not just in the title, but in the character of these wonderful Monadnock Music Festival and premiered by the musicians on this recording in 2009. —Scott Lindroth recent compositions. —Jonathan Bagg Stephen Jaffe: four pieces Quasi Sonata Miriam Gideon: creature to creature Stephen Jaffe’s music has been featured at major festivals including the Nottingham, Tanglewood, Miriam Gideon (1906-1996) lived and worked in New York City for much of her life, as a student and and Oregon Bach Festivals, and performed by ensembles such as the National Symphony, the San teacher. Her mentors were Roger Sessions and Lazare Saminsky. She taught at Brooklyn College, City Francisco, North Carolina and New Jersey Symphonies, the R.A.I. of Rome, Slovenska Filharmonija, College, CUNY, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and the Manhattan School of Music, in a career that Berlin’s Spectrum Concerts, and London’s Lontano. Recent milestones include the premiere of gave her sway over many younger composers and established her as a true eminence of American the Concerto for Cello and Orchestra by the National Symphony Orchestra, and a recording of the music. Though she faced the usual hurdles for a woman composer during that time, her sophisticated Concerto for Violin and Orchestra with the Odense Symphony of Denmark. Newer compositions include artistic voice and high craftsmanship earned the early admiration of her peer composers. During her Light Dances, and String Quartet No. 2, commissioned by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society life she received many awards and commissions, culminating in 1975 with her induction into the for the Miami Quartet, as well as two orchestral works written for the North Carolina Symphony. American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Gideon’s compositions covered a broad range of Bridge Records has issued three discs of his music. Jaffe has received the Rome Prize, Kennedy genres, but she focused increasingly on vocal music in her later years, often choosing a chamber music Center Friedheim Award, Brandeis Creative Arts Citation, fellowships from Tanglewood, the National setting that allowed the voice to be an equal partner in the instrumental mix. Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His disc of the Concerto for Violin, with soloist Gregory Fulkerson, received the Koussevitsky International Recording Award. In 2012, Stephen Jaffe Miriam Gideon loved poetry “almost as much as music,” in her words, and she became ever more deft was elected to the membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is Mary D.B.T. and and subtle at setting poetic texts as her career advanced. In her late piece Creature to Creature (1985) James H. Semans Professor of Music at Duke University, where he has taught since 1981. she embraces the playfulness of Nancy Cardozo’s poetic missives to various fellow species, matching their dry wit with her own rarified vocabulary, which in this piece favors heavily the intervals of the Many of my chamber compositions have featured viola, often melding its voice in combination with half-step, tri-tone, and major seventh. The flute and voice dominate the dialogue, speaking the atonal other instruments: with the mezzo-soprano and alto flute in Four Songs with Ensemble; with harp and lingua franca of the mid-late twentieth century, which Gideon elevates to a level of refined lyricism flute in Offering; in my string quartets. With piano, the veiled warmth, and also the mournful quality of such that no dissonance or spiky interval sounds anything but chocolaty-smooth. the viola offered the discovery of new and poetic joinings, and the challenge of imagining and creating —Jonathan Bagg more virtuosic features of which today’s players make this beautiful, adaptable instrument capable. Music can be many things: intellectual or architecturally captivating; but the experience of making and listening to music is for me, most potently a physical, palpable one. Four Pieces Quasi Sonata for viola and piano was commissioned with a grant from the Fromm Music Foundation, Harvard University, and composed in the summer of 2006. The work is dedicated to the violist Jonathan Bagg, featured here, who, together with pianist Donald Berman, gave the premiere performances. Dawn Kramer’s choreographic improvisation Vignette, cleverly uses kleine pop-musik in a fascinating video. The fruits of her labor may be viewed at http://dawnkramer.info/Recentwork/Vignettelhtml. —Stephen Jaffe creature to creature snake hoot-Owl l’envoi Who let you in Be still, I pray, desist, Welcome, cricket, After I barred the gate? Hooter, hilarious. Faithful friend, The Fly It’s much too late Old dusty feathers, Once more to mourn Compose, you said, a poem for this fly To talk of sin. Perched in the high The summer’s end. Who simply will not die. The orchard bare Crotch of darkness – From secret corners And flowers gone to seed – Don’t you know what time is? Of my walls A Love poem, said I, There is no need Your wistful phrase And wrote it with a sigh To tempt or dare. What scatologic jest One voice recalls. And hung it up to dry. Calls forth such laughter So when the fly flew by, Beware, my fleet That I cannot rest? Although the rose (I cannot tell you why) Monosyllabic foe, What huge obscenity Is black with frost, He read it with his metaphysical eye. This rusty hoe – Drops through the leaves Tell me, my cricket, Yet, it was sweet, Of midnight? Stop.