Artistic Director
Kevin Stalheim

Present Music
1840 N. Farwell #301
Milwaukee, WI 53202

Phone: 414-271-0711
Fax: 414-271-7998

web design by:
darwin grosse
the kmv group

Present Music CELESTIAL BANQUET

Program Notes
November 2001

The Bucks are a Northern Contemporary Style Drum that consists of Woodland Tribal Members from Milwaukee area. The drum group has traveled extensively throughout the United States and Canada, hosting, supporting, and performing at Pow-wows and other gatherings. The Bucks not only sing and practice traditional song and dance, but also compose a great deal of their own songs. In the future the Bucks hope to keep on traveling and singing for all people throughout Indian Country. Tribes represented by The Bucks include Ojibway, Oneida, Winnebago, Menominee, and Ho-Chunk. Tour performances in 2001 will take them to New York City, Albuquerque, Nashville, Evansville, Cherokee-North Carolina, Louisville-Kentucky, Ann Arbor-Michigan, Salamanca-New York, Denver-Colorado, Toronto-Ontario, and Columbus-Ohio. The Bucks can also be heard on the following compact disc recordings: Com'in Alive, Relentless Warrior, and Gathering.

Le Banquet Celeste / Celestial Banquet was the first work published by Olivier Messiaen. He wrote it in1926 and revised it in 1932. The piece is a eucharistic meditation based on the passage from the Gospel of St. John: "He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood dwelleth in me and I in him."

Gary Lewis is a native of Oshkosh, Wisconsin. He holds a Bachelor of Music Education from the University of Wisconsin and a Master of Church Music from Northwestern University, studying organ with Wolfgang Rübsam and Arthur Poister and conducting with Margaret Hillis. While in the service he was conductor of the Fifth US Army Chorus and the United States Continental Army Chorus. He was for eight seasons Artistic Director of the 100-voice Virginia Choral Society. Lewis has worked in full-time church music for 28 years and in 1994 became Director of Music and Organist at Bethel Lutheran Church in Madison, Wisconsin. He has performed as keyboardist periodically in the Madison Symphony.

Karen Beaumont has been the Music Director at St. James Episcopal Church, Milwaukee, since 1988. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in Musicology and has studied organ with Gerre Hancock, John Behnke, Jeffrey Peterson, and Carol Haackenson. She made her New York City debut in September of 1999 at St. Thomas Fifth Avenue, performed at St. Peter’s Lutheran in NYC in October of 2000 and 2001, and has future engagements in NYC at St. Michaels and St. Thomas. She is currently working on a recording project on the Pro Organo Label. In addition to her work at St. James, Ms. Beaumont is a frequent recitalist and accompanist in the Milwaukee area and teaches piano and organ.

Kabir, the fifteenth-century Indian poet, was the son of a Moslem weaver in Benares. His spiritual growth was influenced by Sufi poets and the ideas of the Hindus.

Alfred Schnittke has a fascinating bicultural background. He was born of German parents, in an area of the USSR that was once the German Republic of Volga. His father was a correspondent with a German-language newspaper published in the Soviet Union, which meant that the family traveled an unusual amount during Schnittke’s childhood. From 1946-1948 they lived in Vienna. Although he currently resides in Hamburg, Schnittke still maintains a residence in Moscow. He acknowledges the influence of Gustav Mahler, Charles Ives, and the serialist music of Henri Pousseur. His music often juxtaposes widely divergent styles, jolting the listener’s sensibilities with apparently unrelated musical languages.

The Cello Sonata No. 1, which dates from 1978, is a representative amalgam. It has improvisatory and sometimes strident dramatic sections that alternate with tranquil diatonicism. The Sonata opens with an introduction for unaccompanied cello that begins elegiacally, then passes through impassioned and agitated sections. It leads to a central Presto in perpetuum mobile with a clear relationship to tradition: with elements of sonata form, foursquare phrases, and easily discernible canonic passages. Schnittke uses these time-honored academic vehicles to deliver music of seething energy, aggressive anger, and fiendish difficulty, particularly for the cello. He follows the Presto with a slow movement marked Largo, which reestablishes the elegiac atmosphere of the introduction. The demonic frenzy of the Presto leaves a nerve-wracked shadow hanging over the surface calm of the finale. A grim passage built on a c-minor ostinato in the piano part has the pall of a funeral march. The cello later follows with its won organ point on a low C, as piano flutters around uncertainly in the high register, like a languid butterfly. The last breath of life is not enough to assuage the cosmic finality of this very dark work. (Laurie Shulman)

Persians and Afghanis call Rumi "Jelaluddin Balkhi." He was born September 30, 1207, in Balkh, Afghanistan, which was then part of the Persian empire. The name Rumi means "from Roman Anatolia." He was not known by that name, of course, until after his family, fleeing the threat of the invading Mongol armies, emigrated to Konya, Turkey, sometime between 1215 and 1220.

Litanies by Jehan Alain was written in August of 1937, less than three years before his death fighting for the defense of France in 1940. Alain inscribed the following statement on the score which he dedicated to Madame Virginie Schildge-Bianchini:

"When the Christian soul no longer finds new words in its distress to implore God's mercy, it repeats ceaselessly and with a vehement faith the same invocation. Reason reaches its limit. Faith alone continues its ascent."

Though I rarely advocate considering text when listening to music, I think that the statement above lends poignancy to the listening experience. (Karen Beaumont)

English Translation of Sh’ma Yisrael (Hear, O Israel)

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is One
Praised be his name whose glorious kingdom is forever and ever.

Qu Xiaosong’s compositions have been performed worldwide to critical acclaim. About Qu’s music, European critics have written, "Qu is a master of tense silence, his music fluctuates between intense peace and violent drama and this lends it an extremely theatrical effect" and "Qu’s music opens up to an eternity reaching back in time."

"Qu’s compositions incorporate much ‘raw material’ from China’s folk traditions, most notably their immediacy of approach. What Qu accomplishes, however, is not the archeological retrieval of these traditions, but rather their redevelopment, rearrangement, and reinvention. Qu creates something completely new, an ingenious synthesis that has grown from the fertile ground of China. The result is enchanting, powerfully dramatic and yet pure, and possessed of a commanding tranquility; it is (Chinese) music for the 21^st century."

A self-taught violinist, who was soon a member of the Peking Opera Orchestra, Qu attended the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, where he studied composition and became a faculty member upon his graduation. Following his time in Beijing, he was invited to be a visiting scholar by the Center for US-China Arts Exchange of Columbia University in New York. Dividing his time between the U.S. and China, he is currently teaching at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. His works are published by Peer Southern (U.S.A.) and Faber Music (U.K).

Ji (silence) is a basic title of a series of solo and chamber music pieces. Each of the works (#1-4) has its own specific title, and in the case of Ji #4, the title is KOU which, in Ancient Chinese, means "knock, ask and thanks."

The text of Ji #4 KOU is:

Thanks —
Thanks to the Heaven and Earth
Thanks to the gods and ghosts
Thanks to the Sun & Moon
Thanks to the mountains and rivers
Thanks to our ancestors
Thanks to mothers and fathers
It’s my true thankfulness to giving.

String Quartet No. 4 by Ben Johnston is a set of variations on the hymn tune Amazing Grace. The tune appealed to Ben Johnston for symbolic and musical reasons. Randall Shinn, a former student, compared Johnston’s use of Amazing Grace to Ives’ use of preexisting melodies, saying, "A connection with Ives seems particularly apt in that the texture of this quartet appears simultaneously to stem from the hymn and to transcend it — this transcendental atmosphere ultimately transforming our perception of the hymn itself and making distinction among the substance, the transformation, and the transformed imagery difficult." The result is a beautiful piece that can be appreciated and understood on many levels. Frequently listeners react emotionally, knowing that somehow this music moved them but not quite certain why it did. (Heidi von Gunden)

Ben Johnston was born in Macon, Georgia in 1926, and holds degrees from William and Mary College, Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and Mills College. He joined the faculty of the University of Illinois in 1951, and currently serves as Professor of Composition and Theory.

Text for Amazing Grace

Amazing Grace!
How Sweet the sound,
That saved a soul like me.
I once was lost
But now I’m found,
Was blind, but now I see
When we’ve been there
Ten Thousand years
Bright shinning as the sun,
We’ve no less days
To sing God’s grace
Than when we’d first begun.

 

Words by John Newton (1725-1807). The melody’s origin is unknown, but it is also known as New Britain. Amazing Grace was first found in Olney Hymns, 1779.