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CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Ensemble ACJW
The Academy — A Program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and The Weill Music Institute
Zankel Hall
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 7:00 PM
Ensemble ACJW
Elizabeth Janzen, Flute
Jill Sokol, Flute
Winnie Lai, Oboe
Arthur Sato, Oboe
Romie de Guise-Langlois, Clarinet
Benjamin Baron, Clarinet
David Byrd-Marrow, Horn
Alana Vegter, Horn
Nathan Botts, Trumpet
Paul Murphy, Trumpet
Stephen Dunn, Trombone
Alexander Reicher, Trombone
Angelina Gadeliya, Piano
Gabriela Martinez, Piano
Michael Mizrahi, Piano
Elizabeth Joy Roe, Piano
James Michael Deitz, Percussion
John Ostrowski, Percussion
Luke Rinderknecht, Percussion
Jared Soldiviero, Percussion
Andrew Beer, Violin
Angelia Cho, Violin
Brenton Caldwell, Viola
Claire Bryant, Cello
Kristoffer Saebo, Bass
Alan Pierson, Conductor
David Bullard, Sound Engineer
ANTHONY HOLBORNE Five Pieces from Pavans, Galliards, Almains, and Other Short Aeirs
·· The Marie-Golde
·· Patiencia
·· The New-Yeres Gift
·· Last Will and Testament
·· The Choise
BERIO Linea
INGRAM MARSHALL Fog Tropes
STEVE REICH City Life
The Academy—a program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and The Weill Music Institute in partnership with the New York City Department of Education — is made possible by a leadership gift from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Major funding has also been provided by Mercedes and Sid Bass, The Kovner Foundation, Martha and Bob Lipp, The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Judith and Burton Resnick, Susan and Elihu Rose, and Mr. and Mrs. Lester S. Morse Jr., with additional support from the Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation, The Dana Foundation, Suki Sandler, Mr. and Mrs. Nicola Bulgari, Susan and Ed Forst, and The William Petschek Family.
Ensemble ACJW performances are supported, in part, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts.
Program Notes:
By Steven Ledbetter
ANTONY HOLBORNE Five Pieces from Pavans, Galliards, Almains, and other Short Aires
Born about 1545; died on or about November 29, 1602.
Published in London in 1599, the collection Pavans, Galliards, Almains, and other Short Aeires [sic]. The works to be performed here have been arranged for modern brass quintet by Robert King.
We know little about the Elizabethan-era composer Antony Holborne, though it is clear from his self-description as “gentleman and servant to her most excellent Majestie” that he was relatively elevated in rank. He may be the same Antony Holborne who studied at Corpus Christi, Cambridge, in the early 1560s and was admitted to the Inner Temple in 1565. The fact that he wrote a Latin dedicatory poem to a collection by Giles Farnaby makes it clear that he was well educated. His death can be dated only from the fact that on November 29, 1602, his wife wrote to Sir Robert Cecil (who paid Holborne to carry letters to the United Provinces in the Netherlands on two occasions) to express concern for her husband’s health. Two days later the letter, upon receipt, was noted to come from “Widow Olborne.”
Holborne published a collection of 58 compositions for cittern in 1597 and a collection of 65 works (from which the present selection has been taken) in 1599. The latter publication notes, rather oddly, that the music is in five parts, “for Viols, Violins, or Other Musicall Winde Instruments.” (It is the word “Other” that is odd here, since the instruments first named are strings.)
Taking that as his cue, Robert King selected five “short aires” of various types to arrange for modern brass quintet. The instruments were not familiar in Elizabethan times—or at least, not in their present forms and with the capability of modern brass instruments—but no one would have been surprised at the prospect of hearing familiar works played by whatever combination of instruments the performers were able to offer.
LUCIANO BERIO Linea, for two pianos, vibraphone, and marimba
Born October 24, 1925, in Oneglia (near Imperia, on the Ligurian coast), Italy; died May 27, 2003, in Rome.
Composed in 1973 for Felix Blaska and his Dance Company and dedicated to the Italian journalist Vittoria Ottolenghi, a specialist on dance, Linea was first performed in Grenoble in 1974.
Berio found his way beyond the conservative musical training in the Italian conservatories of his youth through another Italian composer whom he did not meet until they both happened to be at Tanglewood in the summer of 1951, Berio as a student, Luigi Dallapiccola as composer-in-residence. Dallapiccola introduced Berio to the 12-tone technique. Berio was also introduced to the whole range of American music making, including the new electronic music in tape compositions of Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky and the wide-ranging experiments of John Cage.
Between 1965 and 1971 Berio taught at Juilliard, and during that period his Sinfonia, performed by the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Leonard Bernstein, attracted the attention even of listeners who normally spurned recent music. When he returned to Italy in 1971, however, he chose to find new paths rather than simply capitalizing on his success thus far. In particular he wanted to make harmony once again the fundamental element in shaping a musical structure, and he was fascinated by music in which a simple idea heard at the beginning of the piece was gradually, steadily transformed.
The Italian word Linea simply means “line”—and in music that most often refers to a melody, a basic shape that can provide the material for development, as well as the more complex result of that development. As he explained, the “subject matter” of Linea
is the constant transformation of a very simple melody into more complex, differentiated, and independent articulations. Sometimes the four players meet on the same line (“singing” the same melody); sometimes they diverge and seem to play different music—generated, however, by that ever-present melody, which, consequently, is sometimes recognizable (as in the beginning) and at other times is present only as a hidden organizing thread.
Linea is Berio’s first score written specifically to be danced.
INGRAM MARSHALL Fog Tropes
Born May 10, 1942, in Mt. Vernon, New York.
Composed in 1982, Fog Tropes was first performed at the Japan Center Theater in San Francisco on February 18 of that year, with members of the San Francisco Symphony New Music Ensemble conducted by John Adams.
Scoring: 2 trumpets, 2 horns, 2 trombones, and taped foghorns with tape-delay electronics.
Ingram Marshall has absorbed the musical elements of New York’s pioneers of electronic music (including Vladimir Ussachevsky, with whom he studied at Columbia in the mid-1960s, and with Morton Subotnick both in New York and the California Institute of the Arts), of John Adams during his early minimalist phase (the two composers shared a house in San Francisco in the late 1970s), and of the music of Bali and of Sweden, both places where he has lived and studied. Kyle Gann (in American Music in the Twentieth Century) offers this concise summary of Ingram’s style: “His music seems like a fusion of these [last] two influences, static Indonesian patterns plus Nordic gloom.” Marshall has been fascinated by tape delay systems, which have been used by other composers to produce extended patterns of overt rhythmic repetition, but here it most often leads to evocative, atmospheric moods.
Marshall’s best-known work is Fog Tropes, composed while he was living in San Francisco and thus able to be directly affected by the foghorns in San Francisco bay. In 1979 he made a number of recordings of foghorns and other ambient sounds, originally for a work by performance artist Grace Ferguson, to be called Don’t Sue the Weatherman. The result was a tape collage which, through much electronic processing, became a piece in its own right, called Fog. He explains the genesis of the present form of the work:
The idea of adding brass music as an overlay—or a trope, if you will—came when John Adams invited me to perform at the San Francisco Symphony’s New and Unusual concert series. He suggested that Fog might benefit from some “live” horns.
Marshall composed the new version in January 1982, employing ideas (ascending minor triads) from his Gradual Requiem to shape the harmonic element of the instrumental part. As he comments now:
A lot of people are reminded of San Francisco when they hear this piece, but not I. To me it is just about fog, and being lost in the fog. The brass players should sound as if they were off in a raft floating in the middle of a mist-enshrouded bay.
STEVE REICH City Life
Born October 3, 1936, in New York.
Composed on joint commissions from the Ensemble Modern, the London Sinfonietta, and the Ensemble InterContemporain, City Life was first performed on March 7, 1995, in Metz, with the Ensemble InterContemporain conducted by David Robertson.
Scoring: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 pianos, 2 samplers, percussion, string quartet, and bass.
Steve Reich first made his name as one of the leading composers of minimalist music in the late 1960s. During the ensuing 40 years, he used a variety of technical and expressive devices with increasing richness (to such an extent, in fact, that “minimalism” has long since failed to conveys the sense of his music). Early on he discovered that spoken words on tape had a musical quality (that is, a rhythm and melody) of their own. It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966) took a taped phrase of only a few words and developed it on tape with overlapping and shifted repetitions to create an elaborate piece of music of canonic imitations that turned the spoken words into music.
Sampled sound has often played an important role in Reich’s work; it is fundamental to City Life, which makes use of the actual recorded sounds of the modern city—horns, alarms, heavy equipment, and much more—as the basis of much of its musical material. The composer has provided the following comments about City Life:
In contrast to my earlier Different Trains (1988) and The Cave (1993), the pre-recorded sounds here are played live in performance on two sampling keyboards. There is no tape used in performance. This brings back the usual small flexibility of tempo that is a hallmark of live performance. It also extends the idea of prepared piano, since the sampling keyboards are “loaded” with sounds, many recorded by myself in New York City.
Like several earlier works, it is an arch form, A-B-C-B-A. The first and last movements use speech samples as part of the musical fabric, and both feel like “fast” movements, though the actual tempo of the first is moderate and the fairly rapid tempo of the last movement is harder to perceive because of the many sustained sounds. The harmonies leading to E-flat or C minor in the chorale that opens and closes the first movement reappear in the fifth movement in a more dissonant voicing and finally resolve to C minor, which then ambiguously ends as either a C dominant or a C minor chord. The second and fourth movements do not use any speech whatsoever. Instead, each uses a rhythmic sample that determines the tempo. In the second it is a pile driver; in the fourth, heartbeats. Both start slow and increase in speed. In the second this is only because the pile driver moves from quarter notes, to eighths and then to triplets. In the fourth movement the heartbeats gradually get faster in each of the four sections of the movement. Both movements are harmonically based on the same cycle of four dominant chords. The third and central movement begins with only speech samples played by the two sampler players. When this duet has been fully built up, the rest of the strings, winds and percussion enter to double the pitches and rhythms of the interlocking speech samples. This central movement may well remind listeners of my early tape pieces It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966).
Copyright © 2008 by Steven Ledbetter
Steven Ledbetter, musicologist and program annotator of the
Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1998, writes and lectures widely
on many aspects of classical music.
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