CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Alarm Will Sound

Zankel Hall
Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 7:30 PM

Alarm Will Sound
Alan Pierson, Artistic Director and Conductor

NANCARROW Study for Player Piano No. 2A (arr. Gavin Chuck)
LIGETI Movimento preciso e meccanico (3rd movement) from Chamber Concerto for 13 Instruments
JOSQUIN DES PREZ Agnus Dei II from Missa L'homme armé super voces (arr. Payton MacDonald)
NANCARROW Study for Player Piano No. 6 (arr. Yvar Mikhashoff)
THE SHAGGS Philosophy of the World (arr. Gavin Chuck)
HARRISON BIRTWISTLE Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum
JOHN ADAMS Son of Chamber Symphony (NY Premiere, Co-commissioned by The Carnegie Hall Corporation, Stanford Lively Arts, and the San Francisco Ballet)
APHEX TWIN Gwely Mernans (arr. Ken Thomson)
CICONIA Le ray au soleyl (arr. Gavin Chuck)
MOCHIPET Dessert Search for Techno Baklava (arr. Stefan Freund)

Nonesuch at Carnegie

Sponsored by KPMG LLP

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:


CONLON NANCARROW Player Piano Study 2A (arr. Gavin Chuck)Born October 27, 1912, in Texarkana, Arkansas; died August 10, 1997, in Mexico City.

GYÖRGY LIGETI Movimento preciso e meccanico (3rd movement) from Chamber Concerto for 13 InstrumentsBorn May 28, 1923 in Dicsõszentmárton (Diciosânmartin, now Tîrnãveni), Transylvania; died June, 12 2006 in Vienna.

JOSQUIN DES PREZ Agnus Dei II from Missa L’homme armé super voces (arr. Payton MacDonald)Born between 1450 and 1455 near Saint Quentin, France; died August 27, 1521, in Condé-sur-l’Escaut, France.

CONLON NANCARROW Player Piano Study 6 (arr. Yvar Mikhashoff)
THE SHAGGS Philosophy of the World (arr. Gavin Chuck)The Shaggs are an group formed in in 1968.

HARRISON BIRTWISTLE Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae PerpetuumBorn July 15, 1934 in Accrington, England.

JOHN ADAMS Son of Chamber Symphony Born February 15, 1947, in Worcester, Massachusetts; currently resides in Berkeley,
California.

RICHARD JAMES (APHEX TWIN) Gwely Mernans (arr. Ken Thomson)Born August 18, 1971 in Limerick, Ireland.

JOHANNES CICONIA Le ray au soleyl (arr. Gavin Chuck)Born around 1370 in Liège, Belgium; died between June 10 and July 12, 1412 in Padua, Italy.

MOCHIPET Dessert Search for Techno Baklava (arr. Stefan Freund)David Wong, also known as Mochipet, was born in Taiwan.



Arrhythmia: “want of rhythm or regularity, specifically of the pulse.”

Conlon Nancarrow’s music is an obvious starting point for any program of “arrhythmia”: he built his career writing music that juxtaposed and layered simple jazz and blues riffs in the wildest ways imaginable. Due to his frustrations with the rhythmic limitations of human performers, he devoted 40 years of his life to composing for the player piano. We’ve claimed some of this music for live performance. Player Piano Study 2A is typically single-minded in its exploration of Nancarrow’s new rhythmic realm: two unchanging but independent bass lines outline a traditional blues chord progression; above them, a simple tune is played in four different tempos. In his arrangement, Gavin Chuck has created drum set parts to undergird the various tempos, making the study’s layers even more vivid. Player Piano Study 6 draws its material from Spanish music. As with much of the music on this program, the basic materials—a bass line and a single melody—are remarkably simple; it is the tempo relationships that make the piece complex. The bass line sounds like a simple ostinato, yet it is not: although its pitches repeat regularly, the rhythms are dictated by an independent process using two alternating tempos, keeping the whole mechanism of the piece continuously off-kilter.

Nancarrow was unaware that composers had been playing with similar ideas centuries earlier. In the 14th century, Johannes Ciconia (whose Le ray au solelyl is heard tonight) composed a canon in which the three voices sing the same tune in three different tempos. A century later, Josquin des Prez created something very similar. Payton MacDonald’s arrangement of the Josquin’s Agnus Dei, heard tonight, augments the rhythmic complexity of the original by filling out the texture with disagreeing pulses.

Nancarrow drew on ideas from the vernacular to create his “arrhythmia.” In tonight’s program, we’ve also included music that reaches similar results from the opposite direction: inventive music by composers working in the commercial realm. Two electronica artists, Richard D. James and David Wong (better known as Aphex Twin and Mochipet), work in the genre known as IDM: intelligent dance music. The “intelligent” part of IDM refers to the element of unpredictability and irregularity that is common to all of the “arrhythmia” on this program. Alarm Will Sound has already devoted an entire album (Acoustica) to the music of Aphex Twin. Gwely Mernans, heard here in an arrangement by Ken Thomson, is one of the most introverted tracks on the disc. It is based on the simplest of materials: a constant bass drum beat and a single chord progression. But its treatment is surprisingly complex; the bass drums constantly shift emphasis as the sound moves across the auditorium, and the chords are pulsed independently from the many different voices. Mochipet is associated with breakcore, a sub-genre of IDM characterized by complexity, density, and extreme velocity. His Dessert Search for Techno Baklava is based on an Arabic tune that is played at breakneck speed, layered with complex rhythms, and tweaked with surprising shifts in the groove.

The rhythmic complexity of the other commercial music arrangement on tonight’s program, Philosophy of the World by The Shaggs, may not have been as deliberate. The Shaggs were three sisters whose father, Austin Wiggin Jr., formed the band. When Austin was a child, his mother predicted that he would one day raise three daughters who would form a famous rock band. Setting out to make the prediction come true, Wiggin withdrew his girls from school, booked gigs for them around their New Hampshire town, and eventually recorded them in a local studio. The resulting album, Philosophy of the World, is unlike any other recorded. The drummer seems to be flailing, the vocals and guitar are completely out of tune, and all three are never in synch with one another. There is, however, a charming sincerity about the tunes and lyrics:

Oh, the rich people want what the poor people’s got
And the poor people want what the rich people’s got
And the skinny people want what the fat people’s got
And the fat people want what the skinny people’s got

You can never please anybody in this world

The short people want what the tall people’s got
And the tall people want what the short people’s got
The little kids want what the big kid’s got
And the big kids want what the little kid’s got

You can never please anybody in this world

Oh, the girls with short hair want long hair
And the girls with long hair want short hair
Oh, the boys with cars want motorcycles
And the boys with motorcycles want cars

You can never please anybody in this world

It doesn’t matter what you do
It doesn’t matter what you say
There will always be
One who wants things the opposite way

It doesn’t matter where you go
It doesn’t matter who you see
There will always be
Someone who disagrees

We do our best
We try to please
But we’re like the rest
Whenever at ease

Oh, the rich people want what the poor people’s got
And the poor people want what the rich people’s got
And the skinny people want what the fat people’s got
And the fat people want what the skinny people’s got

You can never please anybody in this world

The unusual tuning and complex rhythmic relationship between the parts is utterly beguiling—enough so that The Shaggs developed a cult following. It is unclear whether the complexity of their music is accidental or deliberate. Although the detuned instruments and misaligned parts often sound haphazard, the engineer who recorded them claims that the girls would stop recording and correct themselves whenever they felt their performance was off, and that they seemed to know exactly how the music was supposed to fit together, even if the result seems nonsensical to others.

Of all the works on the program, those by Ligeti and Birtwistle are the most distant from popular influence. Both composers belong to the modernist tradition that has generally eschewed anything regular or predictable. Pulsation appears in these pieces as an allusion to machines: Birtwistle’s Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum is the imagined song of a mechanical bird, each section built on a small rhythmic idea that is turned around and around every possible way; the Ligeti movement, marked “preciso e meccanico,” is an instrumental analog to Ligeti’s earlier work for 100 mechanical metronomes.

Years after finishing the Chamber Concerto, Ligeti’s discovery of Nancarrow’s work (along with African music) would provide a gateway to a new kind of composition based on constant pulse and repeated rhythms. And although the Chamber Concerto avoids such regularity, its obsessive juxtaposition of independent tempos in distinct layers explains the sense of familiarity and resonance he would later experience in Nancarrow’s music.

John Adams’s Chamber Symphony (1992) exhibits Nancarrow’s influence more strongly than any of his prior works. Whereas Ligeti’s encounter with Nancarrow’s music helped him re-imagine his already extraordinarily complex music around a core pulse, John Adams’s music had always been built on pulse: his prior works focused on pulsing rhythms and the “massed sonorities” of many instruments speaking as one. With Chamber Symphony, his first work for chamber orchestra, Adams instead chose to treat the ensemble as a “democratic” group of soloists. This required an approach to pulsation that could embrace a multitude of distinct voices. Through Nancarrow-like rhythmic layering, Adams’s many parts seem to move independently while sharing at their foundation the same unifying pulse.

Written nearly 15 years later, the first movement of Son of Chamber Symphony heads into similar territory, with lines suggesting different downbeats and contradictory feelings of the meter. However, the frenetic energy of the original Chamber Symphony’s first movement is replaced here by a confident swagger: this is lean, concise music, with a heavy, funky groove. Nearly the entire movement is built out of the three-note motive from which Beethoven constructed the Scherzo to his Ninth Symphony. And like Beethoven, Adams spends the entire movement re-using the same tiny lick to myriad ends.

In contrast to the first movement’s obsession over small rhythmic cells in many layers, the second movement focuses on a single, slowly unfolding melody. As in his related movements from Naive and Sentimental Music and Gnarly Buttons, Adams develops a set of melodic turns and gestures which allow the tune to spin on without ever quite coming to rest or repeating itself. And here too, there is a sense of layering: as the movement unfolds, Adams juxtaposes starkly different and wholly independent music against the original tune, which becomes a sort of protagonist always appearing in new situations.

The third movement of Son of Chamber Symphony is a classic Adams finale: a driving beat over which the composer imagines a kaleidoscope of short rhythmic motives. Although the movement draws most explicitly on Nixon in China, this sort of simmering, contagiously energetic rhythmic texture is central to many of his other works as well, and is one of Adams’s most successful and identifiable signatures. Each gesture seems to pull the music in a different direction, to assert its own sense of meter or tempo, but the overwhelming effect of Adams’s high-speed arrhythmia is one of overwhelming momentum.

—Alan Pierson

Copyright © 2008 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Alarm Will Sound
Alan Pierson, Artistic Director and Conductor
Alarm Will Sound is a 20-member band committed to innovative performances and recordings of today’s music. They have established a reputation for performing demanding music with energetic skill. ASCAP recognized their contributions to new music with a 2006 Concert Music Award for “the virtuosity, passion, and commitment with which they perform and champion the repertory for the 21st century.”

The versatility of Alarm Will Sound allows it to take on music from a wide variety of styles. Its repertoire ranges from European to American works, from the arch-modernist to the pop-influenced. The group fosters close relationships with contemporary composers, and has commissioned and premiered pieces by Steve Reich, David Lang, Anthony Gatto, Cenk Ergün, Aaron Jay Kernis, Michael Gordon, Augusta Read Thomas, Stefan Freund, Wolfgang Rihm, Payton MacDonald, Gavin Chuck, and Dennis DeSantis.

Alarm Will Sound can be heard on four recordings. Their genre-bending, critically acclaimed Acoustica features live-performance arrangements of music by electronica guru Aphex Twin. This unique project taps the diverse talents within the group, from the many composers who made arrangements of the original tracks to the experimental approaches developed by the performers. Reich at the Roxy, their latest release, is an award-winning, surround-sound DVD/CD recording of a live concert of music by Steve Reich performed in the famed New York nightclub.

Members of the ensemble began playing together while studying at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. With diverse experience in composition, improvisation, jazz and popular styles, early music, and world musics, they bring intelligence and a sense of adventure to all their performances.

For more information, visit Alarm Will Sound’s website at alarmwillsound.com

ALAN PIERSON
In addition to his work as artistic director of Alarm Will Sound, Alan Pierson has appeared as a guest conductor with the London Sinfonietta, the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, the New World Symphony, and The Silk Road Project, among other ensembles. He has collaborated with many major composers and performers including Yo-Yo Ma, Steve Reich, Augusta Read Thomas, David Lang, Michael Gordon, La Monte Young, and Wu Man, and choreographers Akram Khan and Elliot Feld. Mr. Pierson has also received a Tanglewood fellowship. He has recorded for Nonesuch Records, Cantaloupe Music, Sony Classical, and Sweetspot DVD. Born in Chicago, Mr. Pierson began conducting while pursuing a physics degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a composition degree at the Eastman School of Music.


ALARM WILL SOUND
Alan Pierson, Artistic Director and Conductor
Gavin Chuck, Managing Director
Nigel Maister, Staging Director
Kate Sheeran, Personnel Manager
Carrie Turner, Production Manager
Jason Price, Technical Director


Kelli Kathman, Flute
Jacqueline Leclair, Oboe
Bill Kalinkos, Clarinet and Saxophone
Elisabeth Stimpert, Clarinet and Saxophone
Michael Harley, Bassoon and Keyboards
Matthew Marks, Horn
Jason Price, Trumpet
Michael Clayville, Trombone
Payton MacDonald, Percussion
Chris Thompson, Percussion
Jeff Brown, Percussion
John Orfe, Keyboards
Courtney Orlando, Violin
Caleb Burhans, Violin
John Pickford Richards, Viola
Stefan Freund, Cello
Miles Brown, Bass