CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Ensemble ACJW
The Academy—a program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and The Weill Music Institute

Zankel Hall
Saturday, March 21st, 2009 at 7:30 PM

“[Susanna Mälkki is] prodigiously talented.”—Dominion Post

On this program featuring works dominated by programmatic themes, Boulez pays homage to Swiss conductor and patron Paul Sacher using tone colors of metallic flavor, while Birtwistle honors poet Robert Graves with his piece of endless melodic runs and standing musicians. Adès’s gripping theatrical work Living Toys—at once terrifying and whimsical—recounts adventures of a young Spanish matador and connects them with the death of the computer Hal in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Ensemble ACJW
Susanna Mälkki, Conductor

PIERRE BOULEZ Dérive 1
HARRISON BIRTWISTLE Secret Theatre
STRAVINSKY Concerto in E-flat Major, "Dumbarton Oaks"
THOMAS ADÈS Living Toys

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 Irving Harris Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Kovner Foundation, Martha and Bob Lipp, Mr. and Mrs. Lester S. Morse Jr., Judith and Burton Resnick, Susan and Elihu Rose, and The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation, with additional support from Mr. and Mrs. Nicola Bulgari, Jean and Louis Dreyfus Foundation, Susan and Ed Forst, The William Petschek Family, and Suki Sandler.

Program Notes:

PIERRE BOULEZ (b. 1925)
Dérive 1

French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez displayed an early talent for mathematics, which perhaps explains his near fanatical desire to discover first principles of modernism and imminent laws of avant-garde composition. At the same time he sought to generate music from strict compositional rules rather than unfettered inspiration, however, he allowed his works to proliferate and mutate, with new pieces branching off from old in a most organic fashion. The model in mind is evolution: a logical, scientific process of change over time depends to some extent on random, irrational events and the vagaries of chance. Indeed dérive is the term in French for “genetic drift,” changes without cause that produce genetic variants.

Boulez’s Dérive 1 belongs to an evolutionary process within in the composer’s own oeuvre. The work derives its material from Respons (1980–1984), which itself draws material from his Poesies pour pouvoir (1985) for orchestra and tape. Boulez explained the relationship among these works in familial terms: “My recent music,” he explained in an interview from 1993, “is much like a family tree—one tree spawns many other trees, and so on. Derive I is from Repons, mostly music I left out, so I derived it from the piece, hence the name … Repons itself was my response to Poesies pour pouvoir, which I had written over twenty years earlier. As long as material from another piece is not used fully, I like to expand on it until it is exhausted. This is why they are all works-in-progress.”

There’s another way in which Dérive 1 is derivative: the basic musical idea is a cryptogram of Paul Sacher’s surname. (Sacher was a noted conductor and patron of contemporary music who commissioned works from the likes of Stravinsky, Berio, Hindemith, and Carter.) Boulez turns letters into pitches using both the German and French systems of musical nomenclature: “S” is Es in German, which designates E-flat. The letters A, C, and E already correspond to musical pitches. “H” is German for B-natural, and as the initial letter of the second solfège syllable “ré” (as in “do, ré, mi”), the letter “R” becomes D. These six notes (E-flat, A, C, B, E, and D) form the opening sonority, a rolled chord in the piano.

A single musical gesture governs the first section of the two-part piece: the Sacher cluster unfolds in various ways, then is capped by a trill. At first the individual instruments introduce the gesture in turn, so that the music remains relatively transparent. The texture gradually thickens as the clusters and trills overlap, and the climax finds all instruments playing as loudly as possible in their upper registers. A momentary pause marks the end of the first section and beginning of the second, suddenly quiet and featuring pizzicato, plucked notes in the cello accompanied by isolated pitches in the piano. Throughout, Boulez exploits all of the colors of his small ensemble. However the pitches and rhythms are derived, the timbres and textures hold our interest.


HARRISON BIRTWISTLE (b. 1934)
Secret Theatre

Birtwistle cultivates a sense of mystery and ritual in many of his works, calling attention to the ceremonial nature of concerts themselves and the rituals within the hall as a space consecrated to music. Consider the many rites of performance: musicians appear in formal dress, the conductor enters to applause, and the audience quiets. Strict silence is observed until the end of the piece, except in an opera house or a jazz club where soloists are acknowledged throughout a work. Those listeners privy to the mysteries of musical form might mentally mark progress through a piece, observing the structure of sonata as one might follow a liturgy. When rituals are familiar (frequent concertgoers know when to clap) they offer comfort; when they are not (neophytes fear applauding in error) they alienate.

Birtwistle’s Secret Theatre puts all at ease by challenging conventions and concealing the rules. Listening to the work is “like looking at something that is carefully constructed,” the composer has said, without knowing how it’s made. Yet some rules can be easily explained. The dramatis personae in Birtwistle’s mystery play are the instruments themselves, divided into two groups: the “continuum,” or accompaniment, which is seated, and the “cantus,” the soloists who stand. The division between melody and accompaniment, soloist and group, might evoke the dialogic nature of the concerto, but Birtwistle eschews contest for collaboration. Players move fluidly between the two groups in the manner of ancient Greek theater, which not only incorporates a chorus that comments directly on the drama but also allows a single actor to take multiple roles. By mixing cantus and continuum, Birtwistle seeks to ruin the distinction between melody and accompaniment. “Each of their journeys,” he writes of the two groups, “must be as eventful as the other.” They move as “two beings in the same labyrinth.” Blurring another familiar distinction that posits the soloist as an individual and the ensemble a cooperative, Secret Theatre paradoxically presents the cantus as a collective and the continuum as discrete. As the composer wrote in preparatory notes for the piece, “the cantus … will consist of several instruments speaking as a single voice (choral unison) … individual voices (single instruments) could play in the continuum.” Thus the instruments of the cantus most often play in unison, the texture of religious chant.

The continuum lays down a rhythmic pattern that prepares for the entrance of the cantus in the flute, which is soon joined in unison by the clarinet and oboe. The first climax brings in the brass; next, the oboe comes to the fore. Again clarinet and flute chime in, and the brass then returns. A series of sharp exchanges between the flute and ensemble marks the beginning of the end of the first section. The second, a scherzo-like episode, features the trombone, and the third, slow section a plaintive bassoon. Ultimately the relationship between cantus and continuum might best be described as an amorous partnership, in keeping with the poem by Robert Graves that lends Secret Theatre its title.

When from your sleepy mind the day’s burden
Falls like a bushel sack on a barn floor,
Be prepared for music, for natural mirages
And for the night’s incomparable parade of color.

It is hours after midnight now, a flute signals
Far off; we mount the stage as though at random
Boldly ring down the curtain, then dance out our love.


THOMAS ADÈS (b. 1971)
Living Toys

Thomas Adès attaches to his score the following tale: “When the men asked him what he wanted to be, the child did not name any of their own occupations, as they had all hoped he would, but replied: ‘I am going to be a hero, and dance with angels and bulls, and fight with bulls and soldiers, and die a hero in outer space, and be buried a hero.’ Seeing him standing there, the man felt small, understanding that they were not heroes, and that their lives were less substantial than the dreams which surrounded the childlike toys.”

These heroic dreams are played out in five movements of Living Toys. Our little hero dances with angels accompanied by a horn solo, fights an aurochs (an extinct European ox weighing in at two tons) to the tune of a piccolo trumpet, faces an army (represented by snare drum), witnesses the death of HAL from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (“Open the pod bay doors, HAL,” Dave commands. “I’m afraid I can’t do that,” answers the murderously polite computer), and himself dies a hero in the end. Living Toys is, at least in the mind of critic Mark Swed, “a hero’s life for nerds”; its “goofy music” and “silly sounds” are as inventive, fresh, and original as a child’s boundless imagination.


IGOR STRAVINSKY (1882-1971)
Concerto in E-flat Major, “Dumbarton Oaks”

“Dumbarton Oaks” is named for the estate of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss. Located in Georgetown, the home was, in 1944, site of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, which brought together representatives from the Soviet Union, China, and the UK, and laid the groundwork for the official formation of the United Nations the following year.

Before that momentous event, however, was a more modest yet still important occasion: the Bliss’s 30th wedding anniversary. Mildred Bliss commissioned Stravinsky for a work to celebrate the day (pearl being the more traditional anniversary present). She specifically asked for a work similar in scope and instrumentation to one of Bach’s “Brandenburg” concertos, and Stravinsky took the direction to heart.

As in other of his so-called “neoclassical” works, which more often than not reference the music of the Baroque period rather than the high Classical style, the composer takes Bach as a jumping off point: busy figuration at the opening bears the hallmark of Bach’s driving rhythms, and the endlessly unfolding melodies depend on the technique of Fortspinnung, literally “spinning out,” that the Baroque masters perfected. But Stravinsky never subjects himself to anyone, and he soon leaves Bach and the Baroque behind to push his own musical agenda. His concerto has been considered a study for his first American masterpiece, the Symphony in C (1940), and musicologist Stephen Walsh hears the concerto as possibly heralding the end of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism (which is to say the end of neoclassicism itself). Certainly it marked the end of an era: “Dumbarton Oaks” was the last piece Stravinsky composed wholly in Europe. Saying “goodbye” to the old world and escaping the cataclysm on the continent, he relocated to the US in 1939 and became a citizen in 1945.

—Elizabeth Bergman

Elizabeth Bergman earned her PhD in musicology from Yale University, and has authored numerous award-winning books and articles.

© 2009 The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Ensemble ACJW
Susanna Mälkki, Conductor
Ensemble ACJW is the performing arm of 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. Ensemble ACJW performs at Carnegie Hall and The Juilliard School in addition to bringing performances and educational events to the Saratoga Springs community through a partnership with Skidmore College. The ensemble comes together in different sizes and configurations, having the opportunity to play intimate chamber music as well as larger conducted chamber orchestra works.

The Academy is a two-year fellowship that provides the finest post-graduate musicians with performance opportunities, advanced musical training, intensive teaching instruction and experience, and the skills and values necessary for careers that combine musical excellence with education, community engagement, and advocacy. The program reflects the belief that the artist of tomorrow will require both the ability to perform at the highest level and the capacity to give back to the community, inspiring the next generation of musicians and music lovers.

The Academy was launched in January 2007. The fellows in the program were selected because of their extraordinary level of musicianship, deep commitment to education and community engagement, and leadership qualities. Fellows are graduates of leading music schools, including The Curtis Institute of Music, Eastman School of Music, The Juilliard School, Manhattan School of Music, Mannes College The New School for Music, New England Conservatory, San Francisco Conservatory, Stony Brook University, and Yale School of Music. Please visit acjw.org for more information about the program.