Artistic Director
Kevin Stalheim

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

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

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darwin grosse
the kmv group

Present Music - FROZEN HORIZONS

Program Notes
January 2002

"The idea of Frozen Horizon is based on the landscape of Harstad, the city on one of the fjord islands in northern Norway, where I visited for the Ilios Festival in January 1997. Extreme climate condition prevails during the winter, when darkness lasts all day without any sunlight. One can see northern lights like hallucinations. Beyond the icy earth’s surface, the frozen sea spreads towards a curved boundary line between the sea and the dark sky. Time passes slowly there. Frozen Horizon was composed based on my memories of this extreme landscape." (Karen Tanaka)

The Japanese composer Karen Tanaka was born in 1961 in Tokyo, and currently resides in Paris. While at the Toho Gakuen School of Music, she won several major awards in Japan and Europe for her composition, including prizes at the Viotti and Trieste competitions and the Japan Symphony Foundation Award. Tanaka has studied with Akira Miyoshi, Tristan Murail, and Luciano Berio. Winner of the 1987 Gaudeamus Prize at the International Music Week in Amsterdam for her piano concerto Anamorphose, the following year she received the Muramatsu Prize.

Forthcoming commissions include a Cello Concerto for Joan Jeanrenaud and the Women's Philharmonic, and two works for the NHK Symphony Orchestra in 2002: the first is commissioned by the NHK; the second, commissioned by the Michael Vyner Trust, will be premiered at Tokyo's Suntory Hall in a concert conducted by Esa Pekka Salonen.

"listen, it’s snowing is a delicate stream of consciousness which, for me, eloquently conveys love and loss and beauty." (Susan Botti)

"(me)…..listen, it’s snowing: think. just think of people everywhere and houses and rivers and trees and the mountains and oceans, then think of fingers — millions — out of somewhere quietly and quickly coming, hurrying very carefully….think of everywhere fingers touching; fingers, skillfully gently everything — o think of the snow coming down so beautifully and beautifully frightening ourselves and turning dying and love and the world and me and you into five toys….touch me a little. it will be so pleasant to dream of your hands. for a hundred years." (excerpt from e. e. cummings play Him)

As both a composer and a singer, Susan Botti has been recognized as "one of the fresher, more imaginative voices on the New York new-music scene." (New York Times). Ms. Botti’s eclectic background and experiences are reflected in her music. Most recently, her EchoTempo, for Soprano, Percussion & Orchestra, was premiered by Maestro Jurt Masue and the New York Philharmonic (who also commissioned the work) with Ms. Botti and Christopher Lamb as soloists. She was also commissioned by the New York Festival of Song for their New Millenium Songbook. Her operatic csoliloquy Telaio: Desdamona, called "striking emotional music…" (Opera Magazine), is featured on a CRI CD release of her compositions, listen, it’s snowing. A commission from the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra for solo violin and chamber orchestra, Within Darkness, was premiered at Carnegie Hall and The Kennedy Center in 2000.

"The violin concerto In White was commissioned by Susan Waterbury (a former member of the Cavani Quartet and currently a violin professor at Ithaca College) in 1999. It is constructed of five small continuous movements (slow-fast-slow-fast-slow), separated by several cadenzas in the violin. The slow sections typically are of spiritual nature, with lines and shapes derived from my affinity for the great religious architectural wonders of the various Anatolian civilizations, Christian and Muslim worlds (I grew up in Turkey, spent a year in Rome, and currently devide my time between the US and Istanbul). Some of my works which share a similar starting point are "Domes", "Lines" and "Arches." In contrasting sections the work containes Turkish-like melodies written by myself and some perpetually-driving (fast) sections with irregular meters (a characteristic of Anatolian music) juxtaposed under expansive lines generated more from passion. The instrumentation of the work is unusual with the addition of two voices (which sing without words), with only 9 players and the amplification of all sounds." (Kamran Ince)

Kamran Ince is rapidly emerging as one of today’s most exciting and original young composers. Major orchestras, from Chicago to Istanbul, from San Francisco to Lithuania, have performed his work, and he has composed ballet and film scores. He has won many prizes, including the Prix de Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Lili Boulanger Prize.

Ince was born in 1960 in Montana to American and Turkish parents. His early musical training was in Turkey, at the Ankara and Izmir conservatories. Later he attended the Oberlin Conservatory and the Eastman School of Music, where he earned a doctorate. Among his teachers are Christopher Rouse, Joseph Schwantner and David Burge. Ince was Composer-in-Residence with the California Symphony from 1991 to 1993, and is now a member of the music faculty at the University of Memphis. His music is published by European American Music (Universal/Schott).

Present Music and Kamran Ince have been collaboratingfor nearly 10 years. The first work, Night Passage, was commissioned in 1992, and has continue with a series of several commissions, including the work Flight Box, which premiered in October 2001. Several of these works can be currently heard on 4 CDs, including the most recent release of Flight Box.

"On September 11th I watched the World Trade Center towers burn and collapse from my living room window, and in the following weeks I watched the smoke rise and drift. I had recently started composing this new work for Present Music, but like most of my colleagues in downtown New York, I found it very hard to write any music after the attacks. Smoking and Drifting (2002) turned out to be a kind of chronological emotional diary of those weeks, often reflecting my state of mind as time passed, beginning with still, almost elegiac music, becoming more active, complex, and agitated, finally ending on an optimistic note. I made use of two melodies, both of which change form and dissolve as unisons diverge and the instrumentation shifts, just as the two towers changed form and vanished behind a veil of smoke. Although it was never my intention to compose a piece based on these tragic events, every new work is influenced by a composer’s environment. On a very personal level, bright moments like the simple pleasure of being able to write music again made creating Smoking and Drifting an important experience for me during an Autumn that we will all remember.

Special thanks to Bob Jacquart, Kevin Stalheim, and everyone at Present Music for their support and patience." (Annie Gosfield)

Annie Gosfield (born 1960, in Philadelphia) is a composer, keyboardist and improviser based in downtown New York. She has led ensembles performing her work at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall as part of the yearly Bang on a Can Festival; Festival Musique Actuelly in Victoriaville, Canada; Musique Action Internationale in Nancy, France; the Taktlos Festival in Zurich and Basel; New Music Marathon in Prague; City of Women in Slovenia; and three of the Knitting Factory’s "Radical New Jewish Cultire" festivals curated by John Zorn. Ms. Gosfield studied piano with Rench jazz pianist Bernard Peiffer and Horowitz student Alexander Fiorillo, and studied composition at North Texas State University and the University of Southern California.

Dividing her time between composing for chamber ensemble and performing with her own group, her music combines traditional and non-traditional techniques, and is often inspired by unorthodox and non-musical sources. Gosfield’s work with her own ensemble couples her unusual sampling methods with electric guitar and percussion to create music that incorporates samples of factory noise, detuned instruments and a wealth of unrecognizably altered sounds. Her music has been performed and commissioned by The Bang on a Can All Stars, The Rova Saxophone Quartet, Newband/the Harry Partch instruments, The West Australia Symphony Orchestra New Music Group, The Crosstown Ensemble, Agon Orchestra, Zeitgeist, Pearls Before Swine, Present Music, Relâche and many others. Many dance companies worldwide have performed her music, including Les Grands Ballet Canadiens, the Milwaukee Ballet, Oregon Ballet Theater, and Finaldn’s Gruppen Fyra.

Recent works include Cranks and Cactus Needles, for flute, piano, violin and cello, which evokes the crackles, warps and surface noise of an old 78 RPM record, and Shoot the Player Piano, a video work for an imaginary orchestra of aged mechanical instruments. Her discography includes recordings on Sony Classical, CRI, Wergo, Harmonia Mundi, Staalplaat, Atavistic, EMF, and a recent release on the Tzadik label (entitled Flying Sparks and Heavy Machinery).

Phillip Bimstein awoke one morning to the sounds of cows mooing in the pasture next to his home. Music to his ears, the moos became the inspiration for Garland Hirschi's Cows (1990), a "cowcerto" in three "moo-vements," for chamber ensemble and tape.

The piece also includes the voice of the cows’ owner, Garland C. Hirschi, who asks, "You wanna' know a little bit about my cows, huh?" and then goes on to tell stories about growing up with cows and what makes them moo.

Garland Hirschi's Cows was commissioned by Another Language Performing Arts Company and premiered at the Salt Lake Alternative Music Festival in 1990. It was featured at the 1991 Telluride Composer-to-Composer Festival, awarded honors at Austria's Prix Ars Electronica '92, and featured at the Festival of Art, Technology and Society in Linz, Austria in 1992. In 1992 Present Music commissioned a live score which has been performed in Milwaukee, Seattle, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Atlanta, Austin and other cities in the United States.

The music of environmentalist mayor and former MTV rocker Phillip Kent Bimstein has been performed at Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, Aspen Music Festival, American Dance Festival, and the Bang on a Can Festival. Bimstein was born in Chicago and is a graduate of Chicago Conservatory of Music, where he majored in theory & composition. A CD of Bimstein’s music, Garland Hirschi’s Cows, released by Starkland in 1997, garnered rave reviews around the world. Bimstein has been featured on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, in Parade and Outside magazines. In 1997 Bimstein was awarded Meet The Composer Inc.’s largest grant, the three-year New Residencies. Most recently, in 2001, he has been writing singing and writing songs for acoustic quartet blue haiku.

Night was commissioned by New Songs in Seattle, and uses text which comes from Sappho: A New Translation (translated by Mary Barnard. University of California Press: Berkeley. Used by permission.)

   When they were tired

   Night rained her
   thick dark sleep
   upon their eyes
       
            - Sappho

"Mary Ellen Child’s compositional world is mostly a wordless one. Her delights are rhythmic patterns and instrumental voices at play with one another. Songs, like Night, composed in 1992, have been rare. But since this collection [on the CD entitled Kilter], like the bubble chamber, indicates where she’s been and not where she is, it can’t yet track her developing interest in pop songs." (Bill Morelock)

Mary Ellen Childs is a composer who creates both rhythmic, exuberant instrumental works and bold, kinetic compositions that integrate music and dance and theater in fresh and unexpected ways.  She has created numerous "visual percussion" pieces that embody the concept of music in motion, for her ensemble CRASH.  Childs also composes "purely musical" concert works and has received commissions from the Kronos Quartet, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Dale Warland Singers, two commissioning grants from Lila Wallace/Meet the Composer, and a commission from the Rockefeller Multi-Arts Fund. She is a 1999 recipient of a Bush Artist Fellowship and she is currently participating in a three year residency with the Southern Theater, St. Olaf College and Eden Prairie High School through Meet the Composer's New Residencies program.