CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
American Composers Orchestra

Zankel Hall
Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 7:30 PM

American Composers Orchestra
David Alan Miller, Conductor
Uri Caine, Piano
Evan Chambers, Irish Fiddle
Eva Gruesser, Violin
Terry Riley, Voice and Synthesizer
I Wayan Sudirana, Balinese Percussion
Michael Tenzer, Balinese Percussion

MICHAEL TENZER Resolution/Tabuh Gari for Small Orchestra with Two Balinese Drums (US Premiere)
URI CAINE Double Trouble (World Premiere)
EVAN CHAMBERS Concerto for Irish Fiddle and Violin

TERRY RILEY Remember This O Mind (NY Premiere)

Program Notes:

MICHAEL TENZER Resolution/Tabuh Gari
Born 1957, in New York City; now lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Composed in 2007, Resolution/Tabuh Gari receives its US premiere tonight.

Scoring: flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba, percussion, harp, piano, strings, Balinese kendang lanang, and Balinese kendang wadon.

The gamelan music of Bali is loved for its virtuosity, precision, and rich sound. Even at first encounter, one is floored by the music’s brilliance. Outsiders studying it come gradually to honor its deep system of musical resources, long history, communal participation, and expression. Western composers have used the resources in all kinds of ways, but while techniques can be used, history, community, and expression must be created anew for new audiences.

Resolution/Tabuh Gari is third in a triptych that began with Unstable Center/Puser Belah, for double gamelan (2003) and Underleaf/Buk Katah (2006) for gamelan, brass and wind octet, and piano. My idea for all three pieces has been to merge gamelan with Western music without draining off too much from either tradition, to make a music that can hold its head high in both worlds. It is equally a venture in modeling the integration of various sides of an intercultural musician such as myself. Of course these things can hardly be achieved—only striven for.

In Resolution/Tabuh Gari I import only Balinese drums into the Western orchestra. Compared to other virtuoso drum traditions, Balinese drums and their repertoire of closely interlocked patterns are modest. But as brain, heart and motor of the gamelan in their original setting, they bring everything with them that is needed to oversee the music at all levels. And by eschewing the actual metal instruments of the gamelan, which would jar with their clashing sound and tuning, I suggest that the orchestra has become the gamelan, and vice versa. Yet the orchestra still speaks its very own language. Tabuh Gari, incidentally, is a Balinese name for recessional music. Thus ends my triptych.

—Michael Tenzer


EVAN CHAMBERS Concerto for Irish Fiddle, Violin, and Orchestra
Born 1963, in Alexandria, La.; now lives in Ann Arbor, Mich.

Composed in 1998, Chambers’s Concerto for Fiddle received its first Carnegie Hall performance in Weill Recital Hall on October 20, 2006, with the Nollaig Casey, fiddle; Elizabeth Cooney, violin; and the Royal Irish Academy of Music Chamber Orchestra. The work was revised for chamber orchestra in 2007, and this version receives its Carnegie Hall premiere tonight.

This concerto features two soloists playing the same instrument in two very different styles. Yet the piece does not pit them against each other in the kind of titanic struggle one often finds in many concertos. Rather, the fiddle player and violinist are more like two complementary halves of a personality—they and the orchestra support each other and take the leading role in turn without conflict. At the center of the piece, however, lies an essential tension between the two brands of virtuosity; the work is founded on the contrasts in inflection, timbre, rhythm, and articulation that exist between traditional and classical music at the same time it strives to integrate them.

The first movement was inspired by the death and funeral of a fiddler who I never met or heard play. His son described the events surrounding his wake with such emotion, though, that I wanted to write a piece for all the fiddlers like him who play for the sheer love of it, those who won’t be seen in the record bins or on television, all the forgotten ones who live shyly, quietly, without celebrity, holding a musical center in their communities.

The second movement is a lullaby for my daughter Elena. It was completed on the day after the death of my friend, mentor, and colleague, Bill Albright; as a result the final section of the piece also bears some of the grief I felt at his untimely passing. I once heard a story about the “gentle places” in Ireland: fairy mounds where magical beings are said to abide.

The final movement is a set of four reels. The titles of the tunes for all the movements, taken in sequence, form a poem and an exhortation in themselves—a recognition of loss and a celebration of life in peace and unrestrained good humor.

—Evan Chambers


URI CAINE Double Trouble
Born June 8, 1956, in Philadelphia.

Composed in 2007, Double Trouble receives its world premiere at tonight’s performance.

I am interested in the relationship between structured music and improvisation. As a composer and also as an improvising performer, I enjoy music that combines fixed musical forms with the freedom to react and play spontaneously in the moment. Double Trouble sets up a dialogue between composed music (mostly for the orchestra) and improvisation (mostly for the piano soloist).

The piece is a mini piano concerto in the sense that there is a constant give-and-take between the piano and the orchestra. In five short but continuous sections, the piano comments on and seeks to transform musical material presented by the orchestra, especially in the solo cadenzas. Sometimes the piano is part of the ensemble, sometimes it moves in a parallel but distinct musical space and sometimes it moves in direct opposition and in contrast to the orchestra. The orchestra can function as a sort of rhythm section and set up textures that invite improvisation from the soloist. Double Trouble was composed at the end of 2007 and is dedicated to Saul Galperin.

—Uri Caine


TERRY RILEY Remember This O Mind
Born June 24, 1935, in Colfax, Calif.; now lives in Richmond, Calif.

Composed in 1997 and arranged for string orchestra in 2002 by John Sackett, Remember This O Mind will be performed tonight in an arrangement for strings, voice, and synthesizer; the performance marks the New York premiere of this version.

I found the words for Remember This O Mind in a wonderful book written by Mahendranath Gupta of Calcutta called The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. Gupta, who was a lifelong devotee of the revered Bengali saint Sri Ramakrishna, was possessed of a photographic memory and was able to record word for word the almost daily meetings he had with this master. It is truly one of the great biographical records of the Hindu teachings of Veda and Vedanta about a master who had achieved self-realization through daily communion with the Divine Mother. While reading this book daily in the late 1970s it occurred to me to compose music for some of the songs that I found in this work. Not knowing the music for these songs originally sung in Bengali, I set about working with the English translations with a musical idea that had both Eastern and Western musical elements. The text is set in three stanzas and is a song of renunciation to worldly attachments.

Remember this, O mind! Nobody is your own:
Vain is your wandering in this World.
Trapped in the subtle snare of maya* as you are,
Do not forget the Mother’s name.

Only a day or two men honor you on earth
As lord and master; all too soon
That form, so honored now, must needs be cast away,
When Death, the Master, seizes you.

Even your beloved wife, for whom, while yet you live,
You fret yourself almost to death,
Will not go with you then; she too will say farewell
And shun your corpse as an evil thing.

*maya = the veil of illusion of self delusion that hides the true or higher reality of God’s realization

The song is set in three distinct sections with a brief introduction. The three sections naturally follow the structure of the poem. This form is called a Bhajan in India and is a term to designate devotional songs. This particular song would be sung in its original form by the monks to remind them to have “no aversion, no attachment” which could impede their spiritual progress. In this concert setting, its message might still remind us that life is transitory and impermanent and give us cause to seek a deeper meaning for this existence.

The music was first set in 1979 as part of a fulfillment of a Guggenheim fellowship award. I performed the music vocally accompanying myself on sythesizer. Later I made a version for the Kronos Quartet and myself to perform. A version for ten instruments and myself was made for the Saint Luke’s Chamber Orchestra in New York. This newest arrangement was made in 2002 and is based on the chamber version. The orchestra part is fixed but the vocalist, although having a fixed melodic outline for each section, is quite free to improvise.