American Composers Orchestra


PLAYING IT UNSAFE

Zankel Hall (Seating Chart)
Friday, April 25, 2008 at 7:30 PM

This concert is part of the Orchestra Underground series.

Program

Program Notes

Meet the Artists

THE CONCERT
At a Glance

Welcome to Playing it UNsafe, the culmination of our 2007–08 season at Zankel Hall. All of our Orchestra Underground concerts challenge conventional notions about symphonic music and the concert experience, but tonight is our most daring effort yet: a true laboratory for the research and development of cutting-edge new orchestra music. To arrive at this point, we went on a nationwide search, challenging composers to stretch both their own aesthetic and the possibilities for the orchestra. The response was overwhelming: feeling hemmed-in by the restrictions of writing for the conventional orchestra, composers are clearly clamoring for new opportunities that allow them to explore and experiment. Our search led us to five visionary composers who have spent the last few days in rehearsals, public readings, and feedback sessions designed to hone their work and give curious listeners a chance to dive deep into the creative process that has gone into the development of each of these new musical projects.

Tonight’s works are as eclectic as they are unconventional. Anna Clyne has collaborated with laptop sound artist Jeremy Flower and visual media artist Joshue Ott to create a new multimedia concerto with an “ancient” electronic instrument—the theremin. Charles Mason has written a work that redefines the time/space continuum with what he describes as “music for porous architecture.” (hint: you will hear a glimpse of it on your way into the hall this night.) Jonathan Dawe imagines a future Iraq in the music from his opera Armide, with influences as diverse as fractal geometry, hip-hop and Baroque music. Dan Trueman has brought PLOrk (the Princeton Laptop Orchestra) with him, creating the first-ever hybrid computer-acoustic orchestra. And Ned McGowan arrives from the Netherlands with the biggest flute you’ll ever encounter, the contrabass member of the family, experimenting with the rhythmic and textural possibilities of the deepest depths of the sonic spectrum. (Want more? Ned will appear at BAM Café the following night in a Composers OutFront performance.)

As with any experimental endeavor, we often don’t know how a new piece will turn out until we hear it ourselves. We do know, however, that musical experiments need to be given a chance in the orchestra, and that to participate in these experiments is, without exception, thrilling. So tonight’s concert, Playing it UNsafe, is about opportunity—the opportunity to try new things, to encourage artistic exploration, and ultimately growth. We thank you for being a part of that exciting process.

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Notes on the Program

CHARLES MASON Additions
Born 1955, in New York City; now lives in Birmingham, Alabama.

Composed in 2008, Mason’s Additions receives its Carnegie Hall premiere at tonight’s performance.

Scoring: flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba, percussion, piano, and strings.

The “Playing it Unsafe” initiative of the ACO has allowed me to bring together two creative directions that I have been pursuing for a number of years. One of these I call hyper-connectivism. Hyper-connectivism refers to the idea of disparate parts working together towards a common goal at such a frenetic pace that they reach the border just before chaos, but also the point at which great things can happen. With Additions, by tightly connecting together the electroacoustic and the acoustic sounds my goal is to bring about a feeling of exhilaration and wonder, of being on the edge in a positive way.

The second creative direction I have been moving in involves writing music for architectural spaces in which the music is carefully written to be played in a specific architectural space. I developed an interest in this during my residency at the American Academy in Rome. I had the wonderful opportunity to collaborate with two other Rome Prize fellows, photographer Richard Barnes and video artist/architect Alex Schweder on a multi-media project involving video and photographic images of flocks of starlings. In the work which recently appeared at Yerba Buena, my task was to knit the two galleries and the cortile together. I tried to do this in a unique way by composing the various layers of the composition so that whether one was standing in one room or between two rooms, the listener heard a cohesive composition; yet, the music in each separate space was appropriate and unique to that space.

I am trying to do something similar with Additions but in a more elaborate manner. There are layers designed for the rest rooms, the lobby, the cloak room, and the entrance way. The sound of the wood block provides an aural beacon illuminating the boundaries of the space. Each layer can be heard as an installation in its own space as well as together in a cohesive whole leading up to the concert when all layers are presented together in the concert hall. The music that the musicians perform is not incidental nor is it merely excerpts from the concert piece. It is the fundamental building blocks of the concert piece and thus provides the opportunity for the audience to become familiar with some of the inner parts of the piece before hearing the entire piece in concert.
—Charles Mason


ANNA CLYNE TENDER HOOKS
Born 1980, in England; now lives in Brooklyn.

Composed in 2008, TENDER HOOKS receives its Carnegie Hall premiere at tonight’s performance.

Scoring: flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, tenor trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, strings, and laptop computers.

TENDER HOOKS, a double-laptop concerto, is an experimental work between collaborators Anna Clyne, Jeremy Flower, and Joshue Ott. Stemming from the musical score, the orchestra is stretched by means of live electronics and live visuals, creating a synergistic audio and visual experience.

TENDER HOOKS features technologies and instruments created and developed by the laptop-artists themselves. Flower performs with digital source sounds, custom-made instruments, and the orchestra as a source for live processing. Ott performs with his superDraw software, created for live visual expression. For this performance, Ott and Flower have linked their computers to transmit live data between their respective setups, and to receive live data from the orchestra. This incorporates a wide variety of input devices such as microphones, foot pedals, controllers, drawing tablets and theremins.

Clyne’s score is specifically composed for these two solo artists with orchestra—each element being choreographed through a combination of standard notation, written instructions and graphic representation.

The process of creating TENDER HOOKS has been an exciting relay of ideas and information. We are thrilled to be a part of this program and to have an opportunity to further develop our work in collaboration with the American Composers Orchestra.
—Anna Clyne


NED McGOWAN Bantammer Swing
Born 1970, in Philadelphia; now lives in Amsterdam.

Composed in 2008, Bantammer Swing receives its Carnegie Hall premiere at tonight’s performance.

Scoring: flute, oboe, bass clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion, and strings.

The contrabass flute is the larger cousin of the normal flute, sounding two octaves below and taking up four times as much space. It’s largely unknown in classical repertoire and this is likely the first ever solo concerto written for it.

That being the case, my goal as a composer was to try to show off some of its qualities—the singing highs, the velvety middles, the rich lows, and also some of its possibilities for extended techniques. As a matter of fact, having played the smaller flute for many years before becoming a composer, I was immediately attracted to the low notes on the contrabass flute and the various musical roles possible at the low end of the frequency spectrum.

Regarding the title, I recently moved to a different house after living for 13 years in my little downtown Amsterdam attic apartment on the Binnen Bantammer street. I chose the title to commemorate my time there and because most of the voices in Bantammer Swing are ones I developed during that period.

The piece is a standard concerto form of three movements with a cadenza.
—Ned McGowan


JONATHAN DAWE Overture and Ballet Music from Armide
Born 1965, in Boston; now lives in New York City.

Composed in 2008, the Overture and Ballet Music from Armide receives its Carnegie Hall premiere at tonight’s performance.

Scoring: flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion, piano, strings, and Santur (Persian dulcimer).

Set in the year 2019, Armide, a new opera, predicts a dynamic drama cast in post-war Iraq. In a transformed political and social landscape, a fragile co-existence exists between an integrated American presence, the InnerAmerican Republic led by Renaud, and the Iraqi people. As the Iraqi society is exasperated with the ineffectiveness of current politicians, Armide has emerged as a leader among the people. Armide struggles with ambition, duties, a growing love for Renaud, a driving hope for her country, and deeper understanding of her culture.

Based on music fragments from Jean-Baptiste Lully’s 1686 opera, the new work transforms musical material into a dynamic postmodern syntax by applying composition procedures based upon fractal geometry. In addition, the work involves influences of American (east and west coast) hip-hop and Iraqi folk music as compositional ingredients.


DAN TRUEMAN Silicon/Carbon: an anti-Concerto Grosso
Born 1968, in Port Jefferson, New York; now lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Composed in 2008, Silicon/Carbon: an anti-Concerto Grosso receives its Carnegie Hall premiere at tonight’s performance.

Scoring: solo hardanger fiddle, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, strings, and 8 laptop computers.

The Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) is a new ensemble of computer-based instruments that is exploring how laptops can be used to make music in both new and old-fashioned ways. New: exploring the laptop’s ability to manipulate time, timbre, and tuning, among other things. Old: operating (more or less) within the familiar social and acoustic contexts of the orchestra, chamber ensembles, fiddle bands, jam sessions, etc. . . . We use funny-looking speakers that roughly emulate the way acoustic instruments cast their sound about, and we sit on pillows, as if to meditate, but more often than not debugging our “instruments.”

In this piece, a subset of PLOrk sits in front of the orchestra, in the manner of a concertino, though musically acting quite differently, sometimes processing the sounds of an orchestra to create gentle harmonies, other times providing a (wirelessly synchronized) warped metronome (inspired by Norwegian dance music, of all things) for the orchestra to follow. The laptop itself is our instrument in this piece; we smack it (and are actually able to control its sound this way!) and drive with the trackpad and keys, sometimes treating it like a glass harmonica, other times like a weighty hand drum.

In the original Star Trek series, there was a silicon-based being called the Horta that lived below the surface of a planet named Janus 6. Carbon and silicon, but one row different in the table of elements, are functionally quite similar, but different enough that even the crew of the Enterprise was surprised to discover the silicon-based beings. In reality, life is built on carbon, computers on silicon. In this piece, we are exploring one particular way that familiar carbon-based music making can meet new, silicon-based music.
—Dan Trueman