DONNACHA
DENNEHY
One Hundred Goodbyes (Céad Slán)
About the
Composer
Born
in Dublin in 1970, Donnacha Dennehy has received commissions from Dawn Upshaw,
Kronos Quartet, Alarm Will Sound, The
Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Bang on a Can, Icebreaker, Joanna
MacGregor, Percussion Group of The Hague, RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, BBC
Ulster Orchestra, and San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, among others.
His work has been featured in many festivals, such as ISCM World Music Days,
the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in the UK, WNYC’s New Sounds Live,
Bang on a Can, Ultima in Oslo, Música Viva Lisbon, Saarbrücken,
Schleswig-Holstein, and Gaudeamus in Amsterdam.
Returning to Ireland after studies abroad in the United States, France, and
Holland, Dennehy founded the Crash Ensemble, Dublin’s renowned new-music
group, in 1997. Alongside singers Dawn Upshaw and Iarla Ó Lionáird, Crash
Ensemble features on the 2011 Nonesuch release of Dennehy’s music, entitled Grá agus Bás. NPR named it one of its
“50 favorite albums’’ (in any genre) of 2011.
In the
Composer’s Own Words
In 1926, the fledgling Irish government, four years after independence, hired a
man called Dr. Wilhelm Doegen to travel the Irish countryside to make
recordings of traditional songs and Gaelic speech that were part of a dying
folklore. Doegen, then director of the
so-called “Sound Department” at the Prussian State Library in Berlin, had
achieved a degree of fame for his detailed work as a field recordist, linguist,
and phoneticist. Given his background, his main interest was in the speaking
voice, and this material forms the bulk of what he recorded with his assistant, Karl Tempel, in his
travels around Ireland from 1928 to
1931. Nevertheless, he also made
some remarkable recordings of sean nós,
an unaccompanied vocal music that has been fascinating to me for some time now. These recordings are the
earliest made of this oral tradition and capture many songs that nowadays have
been forgotten.
One Hundred Goodbyes (Céad Slán) is
built around a number of samples from Doegen’s recordings of sean nós songs, which I weave in and out of the musical fabric. On a
deeper level, the melodic and semantic make-up of these songs influences the
musical processes that develop in the string quartet. This influence is not
traditional, but rather reflected by my own postcolonial upbringing, as it
were, as a suburban Dubliner engrossed in contemporary music. All the same,
both on an intuitive level (my entire family comes from rural Kerry in the
south) and because of my strong interest in the way history shapes our present
in ways that we are not completely conscious
of, I am compulsively attracted to exploring and exploding this source material
that speaks to me both familiarly and unfamiliarly.
Although Doegen did manage to record a number of well-known sean nós singers on his travels, the
bulk of his recordings are of unknown country-folk. I concentrate on these
unknowns in this piece, as in fact the deeply human and alive aspect of their
voices (after all these years) spoke most viscerally to me. The piece ultimately
is in three movements, connected attacca,
and each takes one sean nós song as
its principal point of departure.
The first movement samples a song called “A Dhonncha is Léan Liom” (“Donnacha
do not grieve for me”), which is essentially a stiff warning from a priest, Fr.
Dáithí O’Brien, to a certain Donnacha O’Suilleabháin (Denis O’Sullivan) to
reverse his decision to convert from Catholicism to Protestantism, a choice
often made on financial grounds because of the stiff so-called Penal Laws against Catholics in the 18th and early-19th
centuries. Samples from this song are intercut occasionally with rather fearsome-sounding recitations of the “Our Father” prayer in Irish. (Doegen made a huge
amount of recordings of Irish
prayers for some reason!)
The second movement makes use of the beautiful “Tomás Bán” (“White Thomas”) as
its primary basis. “Tomás Bán” is still sung in the west of Ireland, and it
concerns itself with the story of a man sentenced to death for marrying above
his station. Although sung by a man here, the song is a plea for clemency from
the woman (of the higher class) who loves him.
The final movement is created around
“Céad Slán A Abhainn Mór” (“One
Hundred Goodbyes to the Big River”), as sung in a very distinctive glottal
fashion by a woman from the north of the country. It feels like a fitting
tribute to the voices living on through these recordings, though their bodies
are long dead.
VLADIMIR MARTYNOV
Schubert-Quintet (Unfinished)
About the
Composer
Born in Moscow in 1946, Vladimir Martynov studied piano
under M. Mezhlumov and composition under N. Sidelnikov at the Moscow Conservatory. Martynov belongs
to the generation of major Soviet/Russian composers after Alfred Schnittke,
Edison Denisov, and Sofia Gubaidulina.
In 1973, he began working in the electronic music studio of the Scriabin
Museum, the meeting-ground of many of the leading composers of the Russian
avant-garde. A rock-group, the Boomerang, was formed in the studio with
Martynov’s active participation, and he wrote the rock-opera The Seraphic Visions of St. Francis of
Assisi (1978) for the group. At the same time, he was also exploring the
possibilities of the minimalist system concurrently with Arvo Pärt and Valentin
Silvestrov.
The diversity of Martynov’s interests led
him to study folk music, and he
traveled extensively throughout Russia,
the Caucasus, and Tajikistan. At the end of the 1970s, he embarked on an
investigation of early Russian religious chant. During this period, he accepted
a teaching post at the Theological Institute of the Trinity-Saint Sergius, and
his output was mainly devoted to church music. Starting in the mid-1980s, he
began to produce new works that combined the experiments of his former period,
while continuing his involvement with minimalism (Opus post I, Opus post II for
piano, Twelve Victories of King Arthur for
seven pianos). At the same time, he was also widening his explorations of the
great religious themes in works such as Apocalypse,
Lamentations of Jeremiah, Magnificat, Stabat Mater, Requiem,
and Litanies to the Virgin.
Despite his interest in different genres,
Martynov’s philosophy of music and composition compels him to look for the
essence or core of music. The convention that defines today’s performances
establishes musical elements as separate: the musician, the thing or object
(the music), and the audience. Martynov’s idea of composition is to make a
space where there is interaction between audience, the music, and the
musicians. He has written, “The time comes for a new epoch, a new folklore, a
new ritual. The time comes when there will no longer be a place for composers.
All the texts and music have already been created ... The only thing left for
us is to try to explain them and extrapolate their meaning.”
In the
Composer’s Own Words
If in the 19th century Schumann could write of Schubert’s “heavenly lengths,”
emphasizing the fact that, despite their heavenly qualities, the lengths were all the same a little long, now in the 21st
century Schubert’s lengths appear to be so heavenly that one cannot get enough
of them. Every time I come into contact
with Schubert’s music, I want to prolong forever each moment of sound. I want
to examine every turn, every Schubertian pause through a magnifying glass or
even a microscope. The score of Schubert-Quintet
presents a version of just this way of looking at Schubert’s music. This is a
21st-century view of Schubert. If for Schumann they were simply “heavenly
lengths,” they appear to me as “infinite heavenly lengths”—that is, lengths
with no end. For this reason, the score carries the subtitle Unfinished.
NICOLE LIZÉE
Death to Kosmische
About the
Composer
Nicole
Lizée is a composer, sound artist, and keyboardist based in Montreal, Quebec.
Her compositions range from works for large ensemble and solo turntablist that
feature DJ techniques fully notated and integrated into a concert setting, to
other unorthodox instrument combinations that include the Atari 2600 video game
console, Simon and Merlin handheld games, and karaoke tapes. Lizée has received
commissions from many artists and ensembles, such as l’Orchestre Métropolitain
du Grand Montréal, CBC, So Percussion, and Darcy James Argue’s Secret
Society. In 2010, she was awarded a fellowship from the prestigious
Civitella Ranieri Foundation based in New York City and Italy. She has
twice been named a finalist for the Jules-Léger Prize, most recently in 2007
for This Will Not Be Televised scored
for chamber ensemble and turntables, and
recommended among the top 10 at the 2008 International Rostrum of
Composers. In 2002, she was awarded the Canada Council for the Arts Robert
Fleming Prize, and in 2004 she was nominated for an Opus Prize.
In the
Composer’s Own Words
Death to Kosmische is a work that
reflects my fascination with the notion of musical hauntology and the residual
perception of music, as well as my love/hate relationship with the idea of
genres. The musical elements of the piece could be construed as the faded and
twisted remnants of the Kosmische style of electronic music. To do this, I have
incorporated two archaic pieces of music technology (the stylophone and the
omnichord) and have presented them through the gauze of echoes and
reverberation, as well as through imitations of this technology as played by
the strings. I think of the work as both a distillation and an expansion of one
or several memories of music that are irrevocably altered by the impermanence
of the mind. Only ghosts remain.
MICHAEL
HEARST
Secret Word
About the
Composer
Michael Hearst is a composer,
multi-instrumentalist, and writer. He is a founding member of the band One Ring
Zero, which has released nine albums, including As Smart As We Are, Planets,
and The Recipe Project. Hearst’s solo
works include the albums Songs for Ice
Cream Trucks and the forthcoming Songs
for Unusual Creatures, as well as the soundtracks for the movies The House of Suh and The Good Mother. As a writer, Hearst’s
work has appeared in such journals as McSweeney’s,
The Lifted Brow, and Post Road. His children’s book Unusual Creatures will be released by
Chronicle Books in the fall. Hearst has performed and given lectures and
workshops at universities, museums, and cultural centers around the world, and
has appeared on such shows as NPR’s Fresh
Air, A&E’s Breakfast with the
Arts, and NBC’s The Today Show.
In the
Composer’s Own Words
“What do you think of Pee-wee’s Playhouse?” David Harrington asked me over Skype. He’d wanted to talk on Skype so he could see my reaction to his new
idea. It was the winter of 2010, and
the Kronos Quartet was on break,
back home in San Francisco. I was in my apartment in Brooklyn,
surrounded by my oddball musical instruments: theremins, daxophones, stylophones, claviolas, automatons, and
otamatones.
“What do I think of Pee-wee’s
Playhouse? I love Pee-wee’s Playhouse,”
I said, with slight trepidation, wondering where all this was going. But it was
true—I had watched the show religiously when it aired in the mid- to
late-1980s. As a young teenager, I would shovel cereal into my mouth on
Saturday mornings while Pee-wee Herman ran around his wacked-out house like a
madman, turning knobs on Conky the robot, giggling in the lap of Chairy, and
yelling with his arms in the air when the scary door-to-door salesman showed up. I would anticipate the moment
when Globey, Pterri, Clockey, Randy, Cowboy Curtis, Miss Yvonne, or any of the
other members of the gang accidentally spoke the Secret Word, setting off an eruption of screams and nonsensical sound effects throughout the
playhouse. To this day, I find myself singing the show’s theme song when
I’m having trouble getting myself out of bed in the morning (in the voice of
Cyndi Lauper, of course): “Git outta byed!
They’ll be no more nyapin …”
So on Skype with David, I’m sure my face didn’t lie: He asked if I
wanted to compose a tribute to Pee-wee’s
Playhouse, and I lit up at the idea.
David’s fascination with Pee-wee began with
his own kids. The amazing soundtracks were part of the sonic fiber of his
family. His daughter would, from time to time, remind him of the show’s
brilliant use of sound. And now as a grandfather, having gone back and re-watched
and re-heard the episodes for a second round, he began to realize how
incredibly unique every aspect of Pee-wee’s Playhouse was. He recently
told me in an e-mail, “In terms of sheer sound effects, there has never been anything like it on TV.”
The music for Pee-wee’s Playhouse
was composed by a rotating cast of diverse musicians, including Mark
Mothersbaugh, Danny Elfman, Todd Rundgren, Dweezil Zappa, and Van Dyke Parks.
The audio tracks incorporate some of the most bizarre sound effects and
whacked-out melodies known to television: a
barrage of blips and beeps layered on top of quirky polkas and dreamy waltzes—a
Foley artist’s loony bin, which closely relates to the kind of music I love to
compose and play around with. David has been to my apartment and played with my
collection of oddball musical instruments and toys, and I have done the same at
the Kronos headquarters in San Francisco—two adults rummaging through boxes of
pull-string dolls, wind-up whistling tops, and horns that require us to turn
them around several times just to figure out where the mouthpieces are.
Clearly, David has also heard the crooked waltzes and polkas I love to
incorporate into my own compositions. My inspirations have often pulled from
the creative works of Mothersbaugh, Elfman, and Parks, as well as those who
came before: Raymond Scott, Carl Stalling, Kurt Weill, and even Saint-Saëns,
Prokofiev, and Beethoven, for that matter.
As a teenager watching TV on a Saturday morning, I probably wished I
could create something as exciting and loony as Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Perhaps, at some point, I even wished that one
day I’d create something that would get performed by the Kronos Quartet at
Carnegie Hall. And here we are. Thank you for the inspiration, Pee-wee. May all
your wishes be granted, too. In the immortal words of Jambi the Genie, “Mecca lecca hi, mecca hiney ho!”