Saturday / October 4 / 7:30 pm
Contempo: Spheres of Influence
Shulamit Ran, artistic director
Cliff Colnot, conductor
Stephen Gosling, piano

eighth blackbird
Tim Munro, flute
Michael Maccaferri, clarinet
Matt Albert, violin/viola
Nicholas Photinos, cello
Lisa Kaplan, piano
Matthew Duvall, percussion

Pacifica Quartet
Simin Ganatra, violin
Sibbi Bernhardsson, violin
Masumi Per Rostad, viola
Brandon Vamos, cello

OLIVIER MESSIAEN
b. 1908 in Avignon
d. 1992 in Paris

Piece for Piano and String Quartet

Piece for Piano and String Quartet is one of the last works Messiaen composed before his death on April 27, 1992. It is an occasional piece written to commemorate the ninetieth birthday of Alfred Schlee, a longtime director of Universal Edition who tirelessly promoted the works of such composers as Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, György Kurtág, Messiaen, and Arvo Pärt. It was premiered at a tribute concert for Schlee by pianist Claude Helffer and the Arditti String Quartet.

The work features series of short musical ideas separated by moments of notated silence.

A four-note motive is presented at the beginning and end of the work by unison strings, and this thematic cell is developed in entries throughout the piece. The piano and strings seldom play simultaneously; rather, they are treated antiphonally, as if engaging in an energetic dialogue. Uneven phrase lengths and dynamic levels rarely dipping below mezzo forte maintain this lively conversation.

Eleven sections divide the piece, and each section presents different timbres through swift changes in instrumentation, thematic material, and articulation. The sections are grouped into an arch-like structure of 5+1+5, with the middle section serving as the climax. This middle section bears the label “Fauvette des jardins” after a bird—the garden warbler—whose song appears in numerous Messiaen works including his substantial 1970 piano piece by the same name. The dialogue between piano and strings reaches a highly excited state in this climactic section, becoming a boisterous exchange with few breaks to breathe.

TORU TAKEMITSU
b. 1930 in Tokyo
d. 1996 in Tokyo

Ame no jumon (Rain Spell)

One of the first internationally renowned composers to emerge from Asia, Toru Takemitsu created a unique and captivating musical voice, combining the sounds of Western classical music and traditional music from his native Japan and other Far East cultures.

Largely self-taught, Takemitsu was first introduced to Western music during his military service in 1944, and his influences include Debussy, Webern, Stravinsky, and Messiaen. In 1951 Takemitsu joined with other Japanese composers and artists to create the group Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop), which became known for its avant-garde multi-media projects. Takemitsu’s works were soon attracting international attention, including his Requiem for Strings (1957), which was hailed by Stravinsky as a masterpiece.

As Eastern sounds became popular with the Western avant-garde music scene, Takemitsu became a seminal figure, conducting a lecture series with John Cage in 1964. It was through his interaction with Cage that Takemitsu first began to explore the traditional music of his native country. From the early 1960s onwards, Takemitsu made use of Japanese traditional instruments such as the biwa (a type of lute) and shakuhachi (a type of flute), writing in a contemporary European style while also developing rhythmic and non-diatonic sounds from his Japanese heritage.

Popular perception of Takemitsu as a figure able to transcend disparate cultures led to numerous commissions worldwide, including his well-known November Steps, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1967. Takemitsu’s talents were not restricted to concert music, but extended to cinema as well. He wrote over ninety film scores, including music for Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes and Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, which won Takemitsu a Los Angeles Film Critics Award in 1987.

Rain Spell belongs to Takemitsu’s “Rain” series—a group of works that draw upon images of falling water, including Rain Garden, Rain Tree, and Rain Coming. As early as Water Music (1960), the theme of water captivated Takemitsu, who described his compositional practices in terms of flowing water: “Thinking of musical form, I think of liquid form. I wish for musical changes to be as gradual as the tides.”

Written for the Japanese contemporary music ensemble Sound Space Ark, Rain Spell unfolds organically as an alternation between the entire ensemble and instrumental solos or duets. Distinctive timbral effects are created by a harp tuned partially in quarter tones, multiphonics and trills assigned to the flute and clarinet, and a vibraphone played with a cello or double bass bow as well as mallets.

“Spell” in the English title (“jumon” in Japanese) means an incantation or conjuring; in this composition, the word refers to the magical (for Takemitsu) visual effects of rain. “I have tried here to actualize the gradation of color and spell-binding quality of rain in the midst of a small-scale ensemble.”

GERALD LEVINSON
b. 1951 in Hyde Park, N.Y.

Time and the Bell...

Gerald Levinson has been increasingly recognized as a major composer of his generation. In 1990 he received the Music Award (for lifetime achievement) from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which cited his “sensitive poetic spirit, imaginative treatment of texture and color,” and his “potent and very personal idiom which projects immediately to the listener.” He has received many additional awards, including the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Pew Fellowship, and two N.E.A. Fellowships. Levinson is currently the Jane Lang Professor of Music at Swarthmore College, where he has taught since 1977.

His principal teachers were George Crumb, George Rochberg, and Richard Wernick at the University of Pennsylvania; Ralph Shapey at the University of Chicago; and Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatory. After his initial studies in Paris, Levinson often served as Messiaen’s translator and assistant for master classes, lectures, texts, and program notes. In the early 1980s, Levinson spent several years in Bali (as a Luce Foundation Scholar and as a Guggenheim Fellow), studying Balinese music and composing. The influence of the Balinese gamelan, as well as Messiaen’s clarity of timbre, can be heard in many of Levinson’s works.

Levinson’s monumental Symphony No. 2 was commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation and premiered in 1995 by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. More recent works include two major commissions from The Philadelphia Orchestra: Avatar, composed for Christoph Eschenbach’s inaugural concert as Music Director in September 2003, and Toward Light, premiered in May 2006 for the inauguration of the Fred J. Cooper Memorial Organ in the Kimmel Center’s Verizon Hall.

Time and the Bell… was written for pianist Marcantonio Barone and Orchestra 2001, James Freeman, director. The title alludes to a line from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and evokes something of both the sound world and the musical/poetic preoccupations of the work. The element of time, always fundamental to music, is subject to special treatment in the inner movements, where cyclic, static rhythmic layers interact with one another to reveal constantly changing relationships. Bell sounds—reverberations, echoes, and resonances of all kinds—are omnipresent throughout the work; the piano generally acts as a generator of bell-like motives and sonorities, which are amplified by the resonating percussion, while the strings and wind instruments offer complementary lyrical and rhythmic ideas and counterpoints. Tonight’s program will feature four of the six movements: I. Mosaic – II. Ostinato – IV. Ragamalika – V. Night.

Levinson’s lifelong interest in integrating Asian and western musical thought is apparent in the gamelan-like qualities of the first movement and the reference to Indian ragas in the fourth movement, as the composer describes:

The first movement, “Mosaic,” is a study in fragmentation and discontinuity, as various bell motives and other ideas are crosscut in ever-varying juxtapositions—until a temple bell sounds, suddenly stilling the activity and moving the music into a rapt meditative (and gamelan-like) state, much as the bell sounds in a monastery serve as a call to contemplation. “Ostinato,” the second movement, is a set of accumulating variations on a rhythmic theme presented first by the temple blocks, over an independent (and isorhythmic) line of bell chords in the piano.

The fourth movement is a fleet perpetual motion in dizzyingly changing meters, at high velocity. “Ragamalika,” or “garland of ragas,” refers to a virtuosic practice in Indian classical music in which the soloist whirls through a series of different ragas, or melodic modes, before returning to the principal raga of the piece. This movement continually darts in and out of various related ragas, some authentically Indian, and some of my own invention.

In the fifth movement, “Night,” a melody for English horn (marked musingly) threads its way through a densely layered polyrhythmic background in the piano, chimes, and clarinet and flute. This piece is an homage to Charles Ives, by way of his “In the Night” from the Set for Theater Orchestra.

PIERRE BOULEZ
b. 1925 in Montbrison, France

Dérive I (1984)

As a composer, conductor, and teacher, Pierre Boulez has made a decisive contribution to the development of music in the post-war era, and has inspired generations of young musicians. He first studied mathematics, and later began his musical training at the Paris Conservatory, where his teachers included Olivier Messiaen and René Leibowitz. It was in Messiaen’s harmony class that Boulez first demonstrated his prowess as a music analyst, and it was through the study of modern compositions that Boulez honed his aesthetic stance: an insistence on originality and stringently logical forms, far from what he viewed as the personal excesses of Romanticism. Classes in serial technique with Leibowitz solidified Boulez’s stanch position on twelve-tone writing—namely, that it was the only acceptable basis for composition. Later, inspired by late works of Webern and by Messiaen's Quatre études de rythme (1949–50), Boulez began to apply the principles of serialism to the realms of timbre, duration, and intensity, as well as to pitch, culminating in his Structures I for two pianos (1951–52).

Boulez’s radical modernist aesthetics and polemical articles launched him to the head of the musical avant-garde in the 1950s and 60s, and he gained many followers. He taught at Darmstadt annually from 1954–56 and 1960–65, and was also professor of composition at the Basel Musik-Akademie (1960–63) and a visiting lecturer at Harvard University (1963). In 1954, Boulez founded the Domaine Musical—one of the first concert series dedicated entirely to the performance of modern music—which gave European premieres of works by Stravinsky, Messiaen, and many younger composers. These concerts found an enthusiastic following in Paris and were soon widely imitated.

Beginning in the 1960s, Boulez became more active as a conductor, at first specializing in twentieth-century music, but later expanding his repertory. His recordings have earned him a total of twenty-six Grammys and vast numbers of other prestigious awards. The year 1977 witnessed the opening of Boulez’s Institute for Research and Coordination of Acoustics/Music (IRCAM) at the Pompidou Center in Paris. Boulez intended IRCAM to become a meeting-place for scientists, composers, and performers—a laboratory to realize radical experiments in sound. At this state-of-the-art electro-acoustic music studio, artistic aims determine the course of technical research, resulting in new tools for computer music composition. The 4X digital audio processor, for instance, was built to meet Boulez’s requirements for his major work Répons (1984), which creates an antiphonal interplay of synthesized sound and live performance. Boulez directed IRCAM until 1991.

The recomposition of older pieces has been a major part of Boulez’s creative life: his two Improvisations sur Mallarmé for soprano and percussion ensemble (1957) became the monumental Pli selon pli for soprano and orchestra (1957–62); a version of Notations (1945, for solo piano) for large orchestra was begun in 1978; and during the 1980s he rethought several works including Le visage nuptial, Pli selon pli, and cummings ist der Dichter.

In Dérive I, as the title suggests, musical materials are derived from earlier works: Boulez draws chords and rhythms from his 1981 piece Répons (itself derived from another work, Poesies pour pouvoir), and borrows the pitch row from yet another work, Messagesquisse (1976). A birthday tribute to Paul Sacher, Messagesquisse is based on a musical cipher of the dedicatee’s surname: S = E flat (Es in German), A, C, H = B, E, R = D (ré), and this hexachord serves as a foundation for the pitch material in Dérive I.

The chamber ensemble for Dérive I consists of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, vibraphone, and piano, with the piano typically assuming a leading role. Trills and arabesque-like figures are introduced by the ensemble during the prelude and resurface incessantly throughout the work. After a build in texture and intensity, these figures give way to a regular meter and a gradual rallentando. At the end of the work, the initial trill sonorities dissolve into an instrumental tremolando. Boulez’s carefully calculated proportional relationships govern the instrumentation and tempos of the eight sections, which unfold in large-scale palindromes.

GEORGE BENJAMIN
b. 1960 in London

Viola/Viola

British composer and conductor George Benjamin has been recognized worldwide as an eminent force in contemporary music. The London Symphony Orchestra gave the world premiere of Benjamin’s Palimpsests in 2002 to mark the opening of the LSO’s season-long celebration of his work. Similar retrospective concerts were held recently in Brussels, Tokyo, Berlin, Strasbourg, and Madrid, and Benjamin’s opera, Into the Little Hill, was the focal point of a large-scale portrait of the composer at the 2006 Festival d’Automne in Paris.

Appearing with numerous orchestras worldwide, Benjamin regularly conducts the Ensemble Modern and London Sinfonietta, and has led important world premieres including works by Wolfgang Rihm, Unsuk Chin, Grisey, Goehr, and György Ligeti. Benjamin taught at the Royal College of Music in London from 1985 to 2001, and has held the position of Henry Purcell Processor of Composition at King’s College London since 2001. He also maintains a close relationship with the Tanglewood Festival. Among his many honors are the Koussevitzky International Critics Award and a Grand Prix du Disque (both 1987), Contemporary Record of the Year Award from Gramophone (1990), and the Edison Award (1998), all for Nimbus recordings of his music.

Benjamin studied first privately and then at the Paris Conservatory with Messiaen, also taking piano lessons with Messiaen's wife, Yvonne Loriod. He then studied composition with Alexander Goehr at Cambridge University (1978–82). Benjamin’s style bears the influence not only of Messiaen, but also several other French composers: the rich, resonant chords of Pierre Boulez and Henri Dutilleux, and the scoring and spectral practices of Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail. Later works, with a focus on contrapuntal techniques and derivation from small musical cells, bear the influence of Elliott Carter and Goehr. Benjamin’s most recent compositions employ a polyphonic texture somewhat distant from the harmonic language of Messiaen, but they nonetheless build inventively upon the fundamentals instilled by the French master, especially in the realm of rhythm.

About Viola/Viola, the composer writes:

The idea of a viola duo was entirely that of Toru Takemitsu, who was responsible for Viola, Viola being commissioned for the opening of the Tokyo Opera City Concert Hall in 1997. My initial thoughts of how to solve the many compositional problems inherent within this most unconventional medium may have suggested the viola’s accustomed role as a melancholy voice hidden in the shadows. However, once under way, a completely different instrumental character—fiery and energetic—imposed itself.

My desire at times was to conjure an almost orchestral depth and variety of sound. At first the two viola parts are virtually braided together—numerous elements hocket between the players at such a rate that the ear has trouble perceiving who plays what. Through this, a larger array of instruments is suggested, each defined by motive, pace, dynamic and, above all, register. Only towards the work's cantabile center do clearly independent lines begin to flower. The implied harmony is intended to be as sonorous as possible, the texture sometimes maintaining four or more parts for sustained periods.

MARTA PTASZYNSKA
b. 1943 in Warsaw

Trois visions de l'arc-en-ciel – World Premiere

Marta Ptaszynska is an internationally acclaimed composer whose music is performed worldwide. Born in Warsaw, Poland, she enjoys a multifaceted career as a composer and teacher, as well as a recognized virtuoso percussionist involved mainly in the performance of new music.

Her music has been performed at many international festivals, including ISCM World Music Days, Warsaw Autumn International Festivals, Salzburg Festival, Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and Prix Futura in Berlin. She has received commissions from orchestras including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony, Cleveland Chamber Orchestra, Polish Chamber Orchestra, Sinfonia Varsovia, and the National Symphony Orchestra and National Opera in Poland, as well as radio broadcasting corporations such as the BBC, Sudwestdeutsche  Rundfunk in Germany, Polish Radio and Television, and l’ORTF  in France.

Ptaszynska’s television opera, Oscar of Alva, produced by the Cracow Television Co., received critical acclaim at the International Festival of Television Operas in Salzburg in 1989. Her opera for children, Mister Marimba, has enjoyed a phenomenal success for eight seasons since 1998 with 114 performances at the National Opera in Warsaw. Ptaszynska’s well-known Holocaust Memorial Cantata gained international recognition when it was performed several times in 1993 under the baton of Lord Yehudi Menuhin, and has since been performed by the Cleveland Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Edwin London.

Ptaszynska has been honored with many prizes and awards including the 2006 Benjamin H. Danks Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Fromm Music Foundation Award, First Prize at the International Rostrum of Composers in Paris, several awards from the Percussive Arts Society, multiple ASCAP Awards, and, in 1995, the “Officer Cross of Merit” from the Republic of Poland.

In her native Poland, Ptaszynska studied composition, music theory, and percussion at the Academies of Music in Warsaw and Poznan. She also worked privately with Witold Lutoslawski, who became her mentor. Receiving a grant from the French government, Ptaszynska studied in the late sixties and early seventies with Nadia Boulanger and attended Olivier Messiaen’s analysis classes at the Paris Conservatory.

In 1998 Ptaszynska was appointed Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago, and since 2005 she has held the position of the Helen B. & Frank L. Sulzberger Professor in Composition there. Her music is available on Accord-Universal, Muza Polish Records, Chandos, Olympia, Dux, Bayer Records, and Pro Viva Sonoton labels. In 2002, Polish Music Publications in Cracow released a book about her music entitled Music—The Most Perfect Language: Conversations With Marta Ptaszynska.

About Trois visions de l'arc-en-ciel (Three Visions on a Rainbow), the composer writes:

The piece is for clarinet, violin and viola, cello, piano, and percussion, and consists of three movements:  “La presentation” (Presentation), “Les larmes d’Iris” (Iris’s Tears), and “La gloire de l’arc-en-ciel” (The Glory of a Rainbow).

From ancient times the rainbow has been considered a symbol of reconciliation of man with God. But, literally, a rainbow is a colorful spectrum of light. In my work this colorful spectrum is audible in a multitude of sonorities that are derived from one other; timbres gradually and continuously change, similar to the spectral development of the colors in a rainbow.

My piece is an homage to Oliver Messiaen, who was my teacher and mentor. Therefore, I tried to implement in my music several features characteristic to Messiaen’s harmonic and melodic language. However, there is no exact quotation of his music in my work. Rather, I tried to capture the Messiaen-like flavor of beautiful and celestial sonorities.

Over the course of Trois visions, the music is constantly developing, always unfolding new colors and sound textures. The title of the second movement refers to Iris, a Greek goddess of the rainbow. The third movement, “La gloire de l’arc-en-ciel,” is in a form of a rondo con variationi based on an original Eastern European folk tune.

Program notes ©2008 Erin Sullivan