CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
American Composers Orchestra

Zankel Hall
Friday, April 25th, 2008 at 7:30 PM

American Composers Orchestra
Jeffrey Milarsky, Conductor
Amir ElSaffar, Santur
Jeremy Flower, Laptop
Ned McGowan, Contrabass Flute
Joshue Ott, superDraw
Princeton Laptop Orchestra
Karim Sulayman, Tenor
Dan Trueman, Hardanger Fiddle
Sarah Wolfson, Soprano

What happens when today’s most innovative musical thinkers pour their creative energies into no-holds-barred experiments designed to stretch the limits of what’s possible with an orchestra? The results of this nationwide search are brought together in an “on-the-edge” display of uncharted musical territory.

CHARLES MASON Additions
JONATHAN DAWE Ouverture and Ballet Music from Armide
ANNA CLYNE TENDER HOOKS

PETER S. HELLER Fanfare for Mary
DAN TRUEMAN Silicon/Carbon: an anti-Concerto Grosso
NED MCGOWAN Bantammer Swing

Program Notes:

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

American Composers Orchestra
Jeffrey Milarsky, Conductor
Celebrating its 31st season in 2007–08, American Composers Orchestra is the only orchestra in the world dedicated to the creation, performance, preservation, and promulgation of music by American composers. Through its concerts at Carnegie Hall and other venues, recordings, radio broadcasts, educational programs, New Music Readings and commissions, ACO identifies today’s brightest emerging composers, champions prominent established composers as well as those lesser-known, and increases regional, national, and international awareness of the infinite variety of American orchestral music, reflecting geographic, stylistic, and temporal diversity. ACO also serves as an incubator of ideas, research and talent, as a catalyst for growth and change among orchestras, and as an advocate for American composers and their music. To date, ACO has performed music by 500 American composers, including more than 100 world premieres and newly commissioned works. Among the honors ACO has received are special awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and from BMI recognizing the orchestra’s outstanding contribution to American music. ASCAP has awarded its annual prize for adventurous programming to ACO in each of its first 29 years, singling out ACO as “the orchestra that has done the most for new American music in the United States.” ACO received the inaugural METLife Award for Excellence in Audience Engagement, and a proclamation from the New York City Council. ACO recordings are available on ARGO, CRI, ECM, Point, Phoenix USA, MusicMasters, Nonesuch, Tzadik, and New World Records. More information about American Composers Orchestra is available online at americancomposers.org.

Robert Beaser is ACO’s Artistic Director, the senior composer in the orchestra’s artistic leadership. He has been acknowledged as one of the most accomplished musicians of his generation. Born in Massachusetts in 1954, Mr. Beaser studied literature, political philosophy, and music at Yale, graduating summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and earning a doctor of musical arts degree. Mr. Beaser joined ACO in 1988 as composer-in-residence, becoming Artistic Director in 2000. He is also chairman of the Composition Department at The Juilliard School. In 1977 Mr. Beaser became the youngest composer to win the Rome Prize, and in 1986, Mountain Songs was nominated for a Grammy Award. His opera The Food of Love received an Emmy nomination for outstanding classical music/dance program. Mr. Beaser has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Fulbright foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship, and Nonesuch and Barlow commissions. The American Academy of Arts and Letters honored him with their lifetime achievement award, writing, “His masterful orchestrations, clear-cut structures, and logical musical discourse reveal a musical imagination of rare creativity and sensitivity … and put him in the forefront of his generation of composers.”

Jeffrey Milarsky is a leading conductor of contemporary music in New York City. In the United States and abroad, he has premiered and recorded works by contemporary composers, including Charles Wuorinen, Fred Lerdahl, Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, Lasse Thoresen, Gerard Grisey, Jonathan Dawe, Tristan Murail, Ralph Shapey, Luigi Nono, Mario Davidovsky, and Wolfgang Rihm. A percussionist who has performed and recorded with the New York Philharmonic, among many other ensembles, Mr. Milarsky is professor of music at Columbia University, where he is the music director of the Columbia University Orchestra as well as the newly formed Manhattan Sinfonietta, which performs 20th- and 21st-century scores. He is also on the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music as artistic director and conductor of the percussion ensemble, and also directs AXIOM, Juilliard’s newest contemporary music ensemble.

Mr. Milarsky received his Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from The Juilliard School. Upon graduation, he was awarded the Peter Mennin Prize for outstanding leadership and achievement in the arts. He regularly conducts The Juilliard Orchestra, with whom he has premiered more than 150 works of Juilliard student composers over the past 15 years. He is also on the pre-college percussion faculty at Juilliard.

As an active chamber and orchestral musician, Mr. Milarsky performs and records regularly with the New York Philharmonic, The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the American Composers Orchestra, the Stamford Symphony, and Concordia. He has recorded extensively for Angel, Bridge, Teldec, Telarc, New World, CRI, MusicMasters, EMI, Koch, and London records.

Amir ElSaffar, Santur

Jeremy Flower, Laptop
Jeremy Flower is an active participant in the underground electronic music worlds of Boston and New York. He has also performed with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Jamie Haddad, Mark Dresser, Gustavo Santaolalla, and David Krakauer’s Klezmer Madness in venues such as Carnegie Hall, LA’s Disney Hall, Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater, the Santa Fe Opera, and Cleveland’s Severance Hall alongside legendary soprano Dawn Upshaw.

He performs solo as keepalive and is one half of the laptop duo Rainbow Bright with Mike Uzzi, aka Smartypants (Traum, Zero G). Flower has also shared the stage with several other world-class elite electronic music producers, including Isolee, Sammy Dee, Greg Shiff, Keith Fullerton-Whitman (Hrvatski), Broker/Dealer, Greg Davis, Marumari, Frank Heiss, and Jake Fairley.

Collaborating with Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov, Flower helped to create the laptop parts for the Grammy-nominated song cycle Ayre (2006) and one-act opera Ainadamar, which won two Grammy Awards in 2007. Both of these works have been recorded for and released by Deutsche Grammophon. Flower was later commissioned to compose a bonus track for the iTunes release of Ainadamar. Flower and Golijov recently completed the film score for Francis Ford Coppola’s newest movie, Youth Without Youth, and are now collaborating on a new composition for WNYC radio with accordionest Michael Ward-Bergemann.

Flower has now returned to his roots as a guitarist, his primary instrument before studying composition and electronic music at the New England Conservatory (B.M. 2001). Writing for guitar, piano, autoharp and melodica, he is composing the score for an independent documentary Animas Perdidas and a new album, working with fellow conservatory classmates Jeremy Udden (Either Orchestra, Planet Earth), Matthias Bossi (Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Book of Knots), and Ashley Paul (Cuddle Magic).

Ned McGowan, Contrabass Flute
As a teenager, Ned McGowan took classical flute lessons, played jazz, and listened to rock. After finishing studies in flute at the San Francisco Conservatory and the Cleveland Institute of Music, he moved to Amsterdam to continue his studies. His musical interests remain broad—from extended techniques to Carnatic forms and rhythms, from jazz improvisation to West African drumming. In 2007, his specific fascination with Carnatic music led to an extended stay in India, studying performance, rhythm, and composition.

Ned has collaborated closely with such ensembles as the Axyz Ensemble, Calefax, the Zephyr Quartet, and Hexnut, his own quintet. His Tools won the Henriette Bosmans Prize from the Dutch Composer’s Union GeNeCo, and Melting Igloos and Moonrise both made it to the final of the Gaudeamus Competition Prize. His compositions have been played throughout Europe, North Amercia, and Australia, and at the MATA Festival (New York), Ought-One (Vermont), Aspen Music Festival (Colorado), The American Music Week in Bulgaria, the Gaudeamus Music Week, the North Sea Jazz Festival, the Klap op de Vuurpijl, the Grachten Festival, and the Karnatic Lab Festival (Amsterdam).

Ned co-founded the Karnatic Lab Foundation with Gijs Levelt in 1999 to promote composed and improvised new music. This umbrella organization runs a monthly concert series, programs a yearly festival with international guests, and has its own record label (Karnatic Lab Records) and house ensembles: Axyz, a contemporary music ensemble, Spinifex Orchestra, a nine piece jazz ensemble, and Hexnut. He currently leads the Crossing Borders seminar at the Amsterdam School of the Arts. Between 2000 and 2005, he was also the director of the Dutch microtonal institute, the Huygens-Fokker Foundation.

Joshue Ott, superDraw
New York–based multidisciplinary artist Joshue Ott creates cinematic visual improvisations, often performed live and projected in large scale. Working from hand-drawn forms that he then manipulates with superDraw, a software instrument of his own design, he composes evolving images that reside somewhere between minimalism, psychedelia, and Cagean chance.

Joshue performs frequently with musicians, sympathetically translating sound to vision to yield immersive multisensory experiences that are at once immediate and synergistic. His work has recently been featured in exhibitions at Paris’s Le Cube, the Playgrounds Audiovisual Art Festival in the Netherlands (2007), and the 2006 Ars Electronica Animation Festival. He has performed at Live Cinema Nights: Silver Lake Film Festival, in Los Angeles; as part of the Boston Cyber Arts Festival; and at venues throughout New York City, including Carnegie Hall and the Knitting Factory.

Princeton Laptop Orchestra

Karim Sulayman, Tenor

Dan Trueman, Hardanger Fiddle
Dan Trueman studied physics at Carleton College, composition and theory at the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati, and composition at Princeton University. He has taught at the Columbia University Computer Music Center and Colgate University. Dan joined the Music Department faculty at Princeton in the fall of 2002, is associated faculty with the Princeton Computer Science Department, and was appointed Arthur Scribner Bicentennial Preceptor in the Fall of 2005. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006.

Dan is a composing performer on both the six-string electric violin and the Norwegian hardanger fiddle. His duo Trollstilt (violin/fiddle and guitar) released its first CD of original tunes in 2000 and has performed widely at contemporary music festivals and folk music festivals. Dan also plays and teaches traditional hardanger fiddle music.

Dan has been active as an experimental instrument designer and has built spherical speakers and the Bowed-Sensor-Speaker-Array, among other things. He co-founded and directs the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk), an ensemble of laptopists with six-channel spherical speakers and various control devices, and is also a member of interface, an electronic improvisation ensemble. Their first CD, ./swank, was released in early 2001, and their DVD, RECORDING FIELD, H, with guest composer/performer Pauline Oliveros, was released by the Deep Listening label in 2003.

While many of Dan’s compositions are for his own ensembles, he also composes for various chamber ensembles and occasionally for orchestra. Several of his chamber works are included in his recent Bridge Records CD, Machine Language. A CD/DVD of his evening-length Five (and-a-half) Gardens (for So Percussion and Trollstilt, with animated paintings) was released in the fall 2007.


London-born Anna Clyne is a composer of acoustic and electro-acoustic music. Her work, which includes collaborative projects with cutting-edge choreographers, filmmakers, visual artists, and musicians, has been commissioned and performed throughout the US and internationally. Recent honors include commissions from Carnegie Hall, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Roulette/Jerome Foundation; awards from ASCAP and SEAMUS; performances by the American Composers Orchestra and the Minnesota Orchestra; and a residency with the Los Angeles–based Hysterica Dance Company.

Anna Clyne holds a first-class Bachelor of Music degree with honors from Edinburgh University and a Master of Music degree from the Manhattan School of Music.


Jonathan Dawe studied at the Oberlin Conservatory and The Juilliard School with Milton Babbitt. He joined the Juilliard faculty in 1995, after receiving his doctoral degree there. The recipient of commissions from the Brentano String Quartet, Cygnus Ensemble, Manhattan Sinfonietta, New Juilliard Ensemble, New York New Music Ensemble, New York Miniaturist Ensemble, Second Instrumental Unit, Manhattan School of Music, Phoenix Ensemble, and the Institute for Advanced Study, Dawe’s works have also been recently performed by the Washington Square Chamber Players and the Manhattan Percussion Ensemble.

The Flowering Arts, a new orchestral work commissioned by James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, premiered in January 2006. Hailed as “a powerful premiere” (Boston Globe), the work was commissioned to celebrate the Orchestra’s 125th-year anniversary.

Recent performances of Dawe’s works include his third string quartet; Ciphers and Constellations in Love with a Woman, premiered by the Miró Quartet at the Wharton Center for Performing Arts; East Lansing Michigan; and Symphony of Imaginary Numbers for small orchestra, which was premiered by the Manhattan Sinfonietta (formerly Columbia Sinfonietta) and Jeffrey Milarsky at Merkin Hall.

In July 2006, the Furious Artisans label released the first recording devoted to the music of Jonathan Dawe. This project, funded in part by The Copland Fund for New Music, includes the premiere recording of The Siren, Horn Trio, Fractal Farm, and Tow’rd Trumpets. A new CD is currently in preparation, in addition to a new recording featuring his Clarinet Quintet (2007) paired with Milton Babbitt’s Clarinet Quintet.


Charles Mason is professor of composition and chair of music at Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama, and is executive director of Living Music Foundation, Inc. Among the many awards he has received for his compositions are the 2005 Samuel Barber Rome Prize Fellowship in 2005, 1998 Premi Internacional de Composició Musical Ciutat de Tarragona Orchestra Music prize, a 1994 National Endowment of the Arts Individual Artist Award, and a Dale Warland Singers Commission Prize in 1996.

In recent seasons Charles’s works have been performed at the Foro Internacional de Musica Nueva in Mexico City, the Quirinale in Rome, the Aspen Summer Music Festival, Nuova Musica Consonante in Romania, the Spoleto (USA) Festival, the Florida State New Music Festival, and Merkin Hall ( by the Washington Square Contemporary Music Ensemble). He was composer-in-residence with the Golliard Ensemble for the 2004–05 season, and his music has been broadcast on Performance Today on NPR.

Charles is currently working on a piece for string quartet and motorcycle engines, commissioned by the Birmingham Chamber Music Association to be premiered at the Barber Motor Sports Museum, and a work for video, cello, flute, and digital sound with New York video artist Sheri Wills. His music is available on ten different compact disc recordings on Innova Recordings, Quindecim Recordings, Capstone Recordings, and Living Artist Recordings labels.


Jeremy Robins is a filmmaker and educator in Brooklyn. He run Ibis Productions, Inc., and has shot and produced documentary projects for MTV and PBS. His dance-for-camera projects have been screened at PS122 and Dance Theater Workshop. He is currently finishing a documentary on Haitian roots music in Brooklyn (othersideofthewater.org). He has taught video production to New York City high school students since 1998.

Sarah Wolfson, Soprano