CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Theatre of Voices

Zankel Hall
Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 7:30 PM

Pre-concert talk starts at 6:30 PM in Zankel Hall with Paul Hillier and David Lang.

Theatre of Voices
Paul Hillier, Director

One of the world’s foremost vocal groups offers a program of modern works, including the World Premiere of a new composition by David Lang (a Carnegie Hall Corporation co-commission), along with works by Sheldon Frank and Luciano Berio.

SHELDON FRANK "As I Was Saying"
BERIO A-Ronne
DAVID LANG the little match girl passion (World Premiere, Co-commissioned by The Carnegie Hall Corporation and The Perth Theatre and Concert Hall)

Carnegie Hall commissions in the 2007–2008 season are made possible, in part, by a grant from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

Program Notes:

SHELDON FRANK “As I Was Saying”
Born June 7, 1943, in Philadelphia.

Tonight’s performance marks the Carnegie Hall premiere of “As I Was Saying.”

Sheldon Frank’s “As I Was Saying” is a text to be spoken, consisting entirely in the clichés that everyone uses when they talk, but which normally get edited out of any written script. I came across the text in Richard Kostelanetz’s wonderful 1980 anthology of Text-Sound Texts. The resulting work was an occasional piece, written to be spoken as my wife, a dancer, performed a solo she had choreographed. In the Merce Cunningham / John Cage mode, her movements and my words would have no connection to each other.

One might think that such a piece would only make sense (so to speak) with an English-speaking audience, but I have found that it works equally well in places as linguistically diverse as Norway, Italy, and France.

Sheldon Frank is a writer living in Hoboken, New Jersey.
—Paul Hillier

LUCIANO BERIO A-Ronne
Born 1925, in Oneglia; died May 27, 2003, in Rome.

Tonight’s performance marks the Carnegie Hall premiere of A-Ronne.

Berio’s A-Ronne is a key work in the contemporary repertoire for small vocal ensembles. Commissioned by Dutch radio in 1974, Berio originally conceived of the piece as a “documentary” for five actors, and it was first broadcast in this form. Although he later reworked the piece for a slightly larger formation of singers—very much suited for concert performance—I have preferred here to go back to the original 5-voice version. There is no better introduction to this work than Berio’s own:

“The subject of A-Ronne is the elementary vocalization of a text and its transformation into something perhaps equally elementary but difficult to transcribe. The work in fact is not a musical composition in the traditional sense, even though the organizational procedures used are more musical (for example, the use of inflections and intonations, the development of alliterations and of transitions between sound and noise, and the occasional use of elementary melodies, polyphonies, and heterophonies). The musical sense of A-Ronne is basic, which is to say that it is common to any experience, ranging from everyday speech to theater, where changes in expression imply and document changes in meaning. This is why I prefer to define the work as a ‘documentary’ on a poem by Edoardo Sanguineti, as one would speak of a documentary on a painting or on an exotic country. Sanguineti’s poem, which undergoes different readings in this work, is not treated as a text to be set to music, but rather as a text to be analyzed as a generator of different vocal situations and expressions. Finally, A-Ronne is also a kind of madrigale rappresentativo, “theatre for the ear,” from the late 16th-century in Italy, as well as a kind of vocal naive painting. The range of given situations, no matter how extensive, can always be related to elementary situations, and to recognizable, familiar, and obvious feelings—a social gathering, a speech in a square, a speech therapy session, the confessional, the barracks, the bedroom, and such like.

Sanguineti’s poem is repeated about 20 times and, almost always, from beginning to end. It presents three themes: in the first part, the theme of the Beginning; in the second part, the theme of the Middle; and in the third part, that of the End. The poem is built strictly on quotations in various languages that extend from the beginning of the New Testament of John (in Latin and Greek), Luther’s German translation and its modifications in Goethe’s Faust, to a verse by Eliot; from a few words on an essay by Barthes on Bataille to the first letter of the alphabet (a, alpha, aleph)—and to the last word, which concluded the Italian alphabet in ancient times after “z,” ronne. From this came the saying “from A to Ronne,” which has long since been replaced by “from A to Z.” The poem is thus also a highly articulated and discontinuous sequence of figures of speech, which explains the frequent uses of musical figures of speech in this work. The occasional sung sections do not have an autonomous musical significance: they are moments among many others—and perhaps the simplest—in the liturgy of vocal gestures. Only the brief final section, based on a series of elementary harmonic “alliterations,” has its own musical autonomy.

Thus, the musical sense of A-Ronne is not to be found in the sung sections, but rather in the relationship that is established between a written text and a ‘grammar’ of vocal behaviors; between a poem that is constantly faithful to its own words and a vocal articulation that continuously modifies its meaning and its referential aspects. The two levels (the written texts and the vocal behavior) always interact in different ways, and always produce new meanings. This is directly analogous to what generally happens in vocal music and in everyday speech, where the relationship between the two levels (the grammatical one and the acoustical one) is substantially responsible for the infinite possibilities of human speech and singing.”
—Paul Hillier

DAVID LANG The Little Match Girl Passion
Born January 8, 1957, in Los Angeles.

Tonight’s performance marks the world premiere of The Little Match Girl Passion, composed in 2007.

I wanted to tell a story. A particular story—in fact, the story of The Little Match Girl, by the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. The original is ostensibly for children, and it has that shocking combination of danger and morality that many famous children’s stories do. A poor young girl, whose father beats her, tries unsuccessfully to sell matches on the street, is ignored, and freezes to death. Through it all she somehow retains her Christian purity of spirit, but it is not a pretty story.

What drew me to The Little Match Girl is that the strength of the story lies not in its plot but in the fact that all its parts—the horror and the beauty—are constantly suffused with their opposites. The girl’s bitter present is locked together with the sweetness of her past memories; her poverty is always suffused with her hopefulness. There is a kind of naive equilibrium between suffering and hope.

There are many ways to tell this story. One could convincingly tell it as a story about faith or as an allegory about poverty. What has always interested me, however, is that Andersen tells this story as a kind of parable, drawing a religious and moral equivalency between the suffering of the poor girl and the suffering of Jesus. The girl suffers, is scorned by the crowd, dies, and is transfigured. I started wondering what secrets could be unlocked from this story if one took its Christian nature to its conclusion and unfolded it, as Christian composers have traditionally done in musical settings of the Passion of Jesus.

The most interesting thing about how the Passion story is told is that it can include texts other than the story itself. These texts are the reactions of the crowd, penitential thoughts, statements of general sorrow, shock, or remorse. These are devotional guideposts, the markers for our own responses to the story, and they have the effect of making the audience more than spectators to the sorrowful events onstage. These responses can have a huge range—in Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion, these extra texts range from famous chorales that his congregation was expected to sing along with to completely invented characters, such as the “Daughter of Zion” and the “Chorus of Believers.” The Passion format—the telling of a story while simultaneously commenting upon it—has the effect of placing us in the middle of the action, and it gives the narrative a powerful inevitability.

My piece is called The Little Match Girl Passion and it sets Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Little Match Girl in the format of Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion, interspersing Andersen’s narrative with my versions of the crowd and character responses from Bach’s Passion. The text is by me, after texts by Han Christian Andersen, H. P. Paulli (the first translator of the story into English, in 1872), Picander (the nom de plume of Christian Friedrich Henrici, the librettist of Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion), and the Gospel according to Saint Matthew. The word “passion” comes from the Latin word for suffering. There is no Bach in my piece and there is no Jesus—rather the suffering of the Little Match Girl has been substituted for Jesus’s, elevating (I hope) her sorrow to a higher plane.
—David Lang

Copyright © 2007 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Theatre of Voices
Paul Hillier, Director
Theatre of Voices is among the world’s foremost vocal ensembles. Paul Hillier created the group to be flexible, focusing on medieval and Renaissance polyphony, contemporary composers of the “new tonality” school, and electronica. The idea for the group was conceived as early as 1989, while Hillier was still artistic director of the Hilliard Ensemble. For Theatre of Voices, he began creating new projects ranging from Proensa, a recital of Troubadour songs, to programs of music by John Cage and Arvo Pärt.

Based in Copenhagen, Theatre of Voices collaborates with many ensembles, including the Kronos Quartet and Steve Reich and Musicians. Hillier directed the first performances of Reich’s The Cave, and subsequently, Reich wrote Proverb for Theatre of Voices. In fall 2006, Theatre of Voices toured in Europe (UK, Norway and Germany) with Stockhausen’s Stimmung, which it also recorded for Harmonia Mundi; the group also featured heavily in the Barbican’s Steve Reich festival. Earlier this year Theatre of Voices appeared in the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, performing John Adam’s Grand Pianola Music with the composer; it also gave the world premiere of a new film inspired by Arvo Pärt’s Passio at the Adelaide Film Festival. Summer 2007 saw Theatre of Voices performing Stockhausen in Denmark, John Cage in Poland and Germany, and Tudor repertoire at the Edinburgh International Festival. Forthcoming highlights include a program of Steve Reich and early music at the Festival d’Automne en Normandie.

PAUL HILLIER

Paul Hillier enjoys a busy career as conductor, singer, teacher, editor, musicologist, and writer. He is one of the world’s foremost choral conductors. He is the founder and director of Theatre of Voices and Chief Conductor of Ars Nova Copenhagen. Until 2007 he was Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir (EPCC), and he continues to record and appear with the choir. Earlier in his career he was founding director of the Hilliard Ensemble. He has taught in the US at the University of California campuses at Santa Cruz and Davis, and from 1996–2003 was Director of the Early Music Institute at Indiana University. His recordings, over a hundred CDs, have earned worldwide acclaim, winning numerous prizes, including, most recently, a Grammy Award for his recording of Arvo Pärt’s music: Da Pacem. His current release, a new recording of Stimmung by Karlheinz Stockhausen, has been greeted with rave reviews worldwide. Since 1991 he has enjoyed a particularly fruitful recording association with Harmonia Mundi USA. His books about Arvo Pärt and Steve Reich, together with numerous anthologies of choral music, are published by Oxford University Press.

In 2006 Hillier was awarded an OBE for services to choral music. In March 2007, the President of the Republic of Estonia, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, awarded him the fourth class Order of the White Star for activities in Estonian music life. The Order of the White Star is bestowed on non-Estonians for services rendered to the Estonian state.

This past summer, Hillier has been busy with various projects with his own ensembles, including performances of Tudor and medieval music at the Edinburgh International Festival, and a new John Cage project at Stimmen Festival (Lörrach). This season, he appears with the RIAS Chamber Choir, Flemish Radio Choir, the Irish National Chamber Choir, and Netherlands Chamber Choir as well as with his own ensembles in numerous projects. For more information on Mr. Hillier, visit paulhillier.net.