T H A N K S G I V I N G

Saturday, November 23, 2002

First Unitarian Meeting House-Madison

Sunday November 24, 2002

St. John’s Cathedral-Milwaukee

Program Notes - Thanksgiving

The Welcoming, Round Dance and Closing Songs all have significant meaning behind them.  The Welcoming Song unites us as common people and brings all of us together.  The Round Dance/Friendship Dance helps us to make new friends and meet old friends.  We invite you to please stand during our Closing Song and celebrate the music and the friendships we have made, especially tonight.

The Bucks are a Northern Contemporary Style Drum group that consists of Woodland Tribal Members from the 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 the Indian Country.  Tribes represented by the Bucks include Ojibway, Oneida, Winnebago, Menominee, and Ho-Chunk.  Tour performances in the past have taken 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.  These CD’s are available at tonight’s concert.

 

Lullaby and Doina by Osvaldo Golijov starts with a set of variations on a Yiddish lullaby that Golijov composed for Sally Potter’s film The Man Who Cried.  In her evocative film Sally explores the fate of Jews and Gypsies in the tragic mid-years of the twentieth century, through a love story between a young Jewish woman and a young Gypsy man.

Defined by The New York Times as "a musical alchemist (who) conjures up new worlds", Osvaldo Golijov takes gestures and sound imagery from his own background as the points of departure for his compositions.  Golijov was born in La Plata, Argentina, on December 5, 1960.  He lived there and in Jerusalem before moving to the U.S. in 1986. In this country, he studied with George Crumb at the University of Pennsylvania (PhD) and with Lukas Foss and Oliver Knussen at Tanglewood, where he received the Koussevitzky Composition Prize. He is an Associate Professor of Music at Holy Cross College and Composition Faculty at the Tanglewood Music Center, and lives in Newton, Massachusetts.   Golijov’s St. Mark’s Passion has recently taken the world by storm, integrating multiple manifestations of the Christian faith in Latin America with other popular idioms.  Recent commissions have included new works for the Kronos Quartet, Dawn Upshaw and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

 

Heycoka Te Deum by James MacMillan draws parallels between Old and New World religious traditions; in the process, it provides a richly satisfying singing experience for singers.  Scored for chorus and bells, Heycoka Te Deum made its debut on May 3, 2000 at the Great Hall of the Cooper Union in New York, performed by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus (BYC) under its music director Dianne Berkun.  For the unusual concept behind Heycoka Te Deum, credit belongs to the renowned youth chorus conductor and clinician Doreen Rao.  It’s based on the translation of a Lakota praise chant, as taken from the book Black Elk Spears, with lines from the Latin Te Deum.  MacMillan has used this hybrid text to create a cross-cultural work with a surprisingly unity of spiritual outlook and mood, assigning the Lakota translations to the advanced singers and the Latin lines to the beginning ones.

James MacMillan’s music is notable for its extraordinary directness, energy and emotional power.  Works by MacMillan also include Seven Last Words from the Cross for chorus and string orchestra, screened on BBC TV during Holy Week 1994, Ines de Castro, The World’s Ransoming a Cello Concerto for Mstislav Rostropovich, and Symphony: ‘Vigil’ and Quickening for the Hilliard Ensemble, chorus and orchestra, co-commissioned by the BBC Proms and the Philadelphia Orchestra.  MacMillan’s Symphony No. 2 was commissioned by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and premiered in 1999 and new orchestral score, The Birds of Rhiannon, received its premiere in London in the summer of 2001.  MacMillan is Artistic Director of the Philharmonic Orchestra’s Discovery series of the 20^th century music, an internationally active member conductor, and in 2000 was appointed the BBC Philharmonic’s new Composer/Conductor.

The Brookfield Central Chamber Choir and Women’s Chorus under the direction of Phillip Olson are auditioned ensembles that explore a wide variety of choral literature in their many concerts throughout the year.  The Brookfield Central choirs are frequent guests at college festivals and clinics; they have performed at the Wisconsin Choral Directors Convention and have sung with both the Waukesha and Milwaukee Symphonies.  In April of 1999, they participated in the New York Choral Festival held in Lincoln Center, where they received gold ratings and the highest scores from the internationally revered adjudicators, Weston Noble and Moses Hogan.  In 2000, they were invited to participate in the Salt Lake City Festival of Gold where they achieved high ratings and sang with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.  This spring, they will be traveling to San Francisco where they will be in a festival setting with workshops and clinics with Chanticleer and their director, Kenneth Jennings.  As a fundraiser to defray travel costs, the choirs are currently working on a recording entitled “Holiday Traditions ­ A Collection of Carols and Songs” which will be available in December of 2002. 

For further information or performance inquiries please call 262-785-3910 ext. 161 or email: olsonp@elmbrook.k12.wi.us

Phillip Olson holds a bachelor’s degree in Jazz Studies from the University of Wisconsin- Madison where he studied with the renowned bassist, Richard Davis; studied composition with Les Thimmig; and sang with the choirs under the direction of Robert Fountain.  Currently, in addition to teaching 3 choirs, and a vocal jazz ensemble at Brookfield Central High School, he freelances throughout the community as a jazz pianist and vocalist.   As a vocalist, he also fronts the 17-piece Big Band, Jazz Works, comprised of area professionals and professors of music from UW-Milwaukee, Madison and Whitewater.  He is currently working on a self-produced CD of jazz recordings with local musicians with hopes to release in 2003.

 

Aspects of Glory (Madison concert only) was written as a commission for the American Guild of Organists for the Biennial National Convention, June 1990 by Libby Larsen.

The second movement, My Home in Glory includes the following text:

            Oh! Glory Oh! Glory.  Oh! Glory,
            There’s room enough in Paradise
            To have a home in Glory!
                        -Spiritual

These three pieces are the first in what I envision as a group of essays for organ on the word glory.  While researching the idea for a set or organ pieces, I became interested in the role of the organist as shaper of our notion for words of praise.  Unlike any other member of the liturgical staff, the organist has the responsibility and vision to create a context for praise.  Pondering this, I became interested in specific words of praise-alleluia, glory, hosanna, amen.  Of these, glory caught my interest.  It transcends the boundaries between the sacred and spiritual ritual.  In fact, glory seems to be most often used either in reference to praise for the Creator or in reference to a state of being for humans achieving some kind of conquering action-usually in battle.  The word glory caught my fancy.  The conquering spirit, or the ability of the spirit to overcome adversity and find sanctuary in “…a home in glory” is the profound change assigned to the word by the enslaved African culture in their Euro centric world.  

In the last twenty years, Libby Larsen has become one of the most important and successful composers in the United States and has continued her exploration of the American vernacular in her music.  Elizabeth B. Larsen was born in Wilmington, Delaware, on December 24, 1950.  She studied at the University of Minnesota with Dominick Argento, Paul Fetler, and Eric Stokes.  In 1973 she, together with Stephen Paulus, established the Minnesota Composers’ Forum, which has become an exemplar for the many composers’ cooperatives that have been established since.

Eva Wright has served as organist, choir director and acting music director for the First Unitarian Society.  She earned a Bachelor of Music from Northwestern University and a Masters degree from University of Wisconsin-Madison.  She performs often in chamber music recitals, substitutes with the Madison Symphony, and is an opera coach and voice teacher.  She presently coaches organ with John Chappell Stowe.

 

Fourths, Mostly (Milwaukee concert only) was written and commissioned in 2001 by the English organist Thomas Trotter.  This performance of Fourths, Mostly marks the American Premiere.

Michael Nyman was born in London on March 23, 1944 and studied at the Royal Academy of Music, of which he is a Fellow, and at King’s college London.  Aside from composing, his musical career has involved collecting folk music in Romania, editing baroque and new music, writing an opera libretto (for Birtwistle’s Down by the Greenwood Side), music criticism (1968-78), performing and lecturing.  His book Experimental Music—Cage and Beyond (1974) is now a classic text on music written after 1945. 

Karen Beaumont has been the Director of Music at St. James Episcopal Church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin since 1988.  She received her degree in Music History from the University of Wisconsin and has studied organ with Gerre Hancock, John Behnke, Jeffrey Peterson, and Carol Haackenson.  Ms. Beaumont made her solo debut in New York City in September 1999.  She performed at St. Peter’s Lutheran in 2000 and 2001, St. Michael’s in 2002 and has dates set at St. Thomas and St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 2003.  In 2002, she completed a recording of French Noels on the Noehren organ (1966) of St. John the Evangelist in Milwaukee.  She is an active recitalist in the Milwaukee area and a frequent soloist with Present Music.  She is also a piano and organ instructor. (Ms. Beaumont’s recording of French Noels is available at tonight’s concert and thru the Present Music office)

 

Song of Ezekiel joins Michael Torke’s ongoing series of works on Biblical texts, in this case by the prophet Ezekiel, who speaks of “lifting the lowly tree” and making the “withered tree bloom.”  Ezekiel intends this as a political reference, expressing a hope for the restoration of Israel to its majesty.  This idea has resonance with adolescence: this is a period of tremendous chance, growth, awkwardness and uncertainty.  Social hierarchies and cliques threaten a teenager’s confidence.  The idea that it is within God’s power to lift high the lowly and bring low the high is a way to restore in a young person a sense of autonomy, strength and inner belief.

Michael Torke is one of the most successful composers of his generation as well, as evidenced by two large-scale, high profile pieces that premiered during 1999.  Strawberry Fields, a one-act opera jointly commissioned by Glimmerglass Opera, New York City Opera and WNET’s “Great Performances” television program (PBS) made its debut at Glimmerglass in July to widespread critical acclaim.  Four Seasons, a 62-minute symphonic oratorio for vocal soloist, two choruses and large orchestra, was commissioned by The Disney Company in celebration of the new millennium.  One of Torke’s most frequently performed orchestral pieces in Javelin (1994), a “sonic olympiad” commissioned by the Atlanta Committee for the Olympics in celebration of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s 50^th anniversary season.  In 1997, Torke was appointed the first Associate Composer of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, taking an active role in programming and in the RSNO’s education program.  Over the past ten years, Present Music has performed numerous works by Michael Torke and has commissioned five new works, including last season’s Song of Isaiah (2002) which has been recorded by Present Music and will be released on a new disc later this season.

 

We’re All Here: “In memory of the victims of the AIDS epidemic, 1980 to the present.”

This autumnal piece is cyclic in shape, a gentle meditation on mortality that ends with rebirth. There’s a good deal of nostalgia for my Wisconsin childhood in it. Inasmuch as there is a program, I imagine it performed outdoors on a beautiful, cool, early autumn evening on the rolling lawn of a prairie-style home somewhere along the shores of Lake Mendota, the smell of grilling brats, newly-fallen leaves, lake water, and Leinenkugel beer mingling in the air. There are children everywhere.

In Hopkins’ 1918 Pied Beauty, he advanced the delightful idea that God may be an impressionist, creating using tiny dots of color, or stipples; when Hopkins mentioned in line seven “all things counter, original, spare, strange” he was referring to animals’ actions in nature as well as humans’ actions in society. I reacted to Hopkins’ curtal sonnet by devising a chaconne (a repeated chord progression) that, in its “open-ended” (it ends each time by modulating into a new key) construction, is a musical manifestation of the poem’s sprung paeonic rhythm. The seamless choral fabric carries my setting of Hopkins’ hymn to “dappled things;” the instrumental ensemble personifies those things.

Robert Frost, in Gathering Leaves, may have been attempting to symbolize in the endless and elusive autumn task of raking leaves the persistent pursuit of unseen ends or the difficulty of artistic triumphs, but I think he was also playfully celebrating the pure ritual of activity enjoyed for its own sake. The task seems endless and the gathered leaves slight and valueless, but it is a necessary cleansing rite whose chief goal is preparation for seasonal renewals. I manifested the emotionally cool elusiveness of the leaves being swept upwards by the breeze in rising whole-tone melodies and tremulous strings; I alternated this scene with emotionally warmer chorale settings of what I imagined to be the gatherer’s internal thoughts.

The poem We’re All Here serves as frontispiece to the 1843 James Fennimore Cooper novel Wyandotte; or, the Hutted Hill. It is a tale of colonial border life, planned and written in the spirit of his better-known novel The Deerslayer. I have chosen to imagine this poem as taking place at Thanksgiving, when families ­ despite the conflicts that divide them ­ unite. I have lost numerous good friends to AIDS. Many were denied acceptance by society because of their lifestyle, some even by their families. We’re All Here is dedicated to the memory of the victims of the AIDS epidemic, 1980-present; however, it is also a tribute to those who have survived. In my setting of Cooper’s poem, I progressed from a feeling of remembrance and mourning to acceptance and, ultimately to the joyous spirit of Hopkins’ Pied Beauty. (Daron Hagen)

Daron Hagen created a catalogue of over a hundred works in every genre from art song and chamber music to full-scale operas and immense orchestral and choral works.  Commissions have come from major artists, ensembles and orchestras around the world, including the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Gary Graffman, Jaime Laredo and the Kings Singers.  Currently, Hagen’s projects include a double concerto entitled Pieta for the Puerto Rico Symphony and the Buffalo Philharmonic.  Also, a concerto performance of Shining Brow with the Buffalo Symphony, a new piece for the Albany Symphony, and the release of the Vera of Las Vegas CD by CRI. 

Hagen was born on November 4, 1961 in Milwaukee.  He began the study of piano, music theory, and composition at the age of fourteen.  Hagen composed and conducted the premiere of his first orchestral work with a local youth orchestra when he was fifteen.  His mother, a visual artist and writer, sent a score and tape of the work to Leonard Bernstein, whose enthusiastic response included a recommendation that Hagen enter Julliard to study with David Diamond.  

In 1990 he began collaboration with the poet Paul Muldoon that has spanned over a decade.  Their first work was Shinning Brow, a major opera that was first presented by the Madison Opera in 1993.  It met with international and popular acclaim at is premiere, has received a number of revivals, and has recently being recorded for a future release on the Arsis label.  Hagen’s other music is also widely recorded on such labels as Albany, Sierra Classical, Josara and Mark, and his published by Carl Fischer. 

His work has received numerous awards including the Kennedy Center Friedheim Award, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, Columbia University’s Bearns Prize and an Ives Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the ASCAP-Nissim Prize. He is trained at the Curtis Institute and Julliard and is active as a conductor and pianist.  He has lived in New York City since 1984. 

 

Quasi una Fantasia (String Quartet No. 2, Op. 64) was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by the Beigler Trust, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and the Kosciusko Foundation.  It was first performed on October 27, 1991 in Severance Hall, Cleveland, Ohio, by the Kronos Quartet. 

The polish composer Henryk Mikolaj Gorecki, born in 1933, readily acknowledges the influence of national, religious, and folk traditions, both upon the avant-garde works which made his name in the 1950’s and the recent scores which have established his as one of the most popular of living composers.  In a decade devoted largely to vocal and choral music, Gorecki produced three major instrumental statements, the trio for clarinet, cello and piano Recitatives and Ariosos-‘Lerchenmusik’ op. 53 (1985), the first string quartet Already it is Dusk op. 62  (1988), and the second string quartet Quasi una Fantasia op. 64 (1990-91) which, like its predecessor, was inspired by and written for the Kronos Quartet.