Program Notes - September 26-27, 2002

Turn Table

Elena Kats-Chernin

"One day, or more appropriately, night, I was attempting to recover from yet another jet-lag related insomnia. The usual, most effective, method is to turn on TV and hope for it to have a sedating effect. After flipping through all kinds of infomercials on several channels I came across and old black and white film noir. Don't remember what it was about or what music was played. However, it had the kind of atmosphere in the visual and acoustic sense that I was looking for in my piece for the Australian Art Orchestra, so much so, that the next, very early, morning I had no trouble writing the first three minutes of it and very soon after the whole piece.

As the title suggests, it has to do with some nostalgia associated with the magic of the old record player. There is another meaning of waiting for destiny to turn things around. For me this is an optimistic outlook, after experiencing turmoil, of major illness in the family for the last one and a half years.

The challenge for me was to write a piece, which would utilize the virtuosic abilities of the ensemble's extraordinary musicians who can play anything in front of them as well as improvise. My solution: quite simple music by extremely fast. One of the players suggested a new tempo: 'ridiculoso'. Thank you." - EK-C

Le Mômo

John Zorn

Inspired by the visionary 20^th Century shaman Antonin Artaud, the music of Le Mômo is some of the most rigorously organized I've ever written. It's almost like a set of variations in which the same series of pitches are repeated in the same order throughout the piece in a variety of ever changing contexts. Taking the incantatory sections of Artaud's long poem Le Mômo (written in his own ritualistic language) I derived this enormous series of notes by applying pitches to letters of the alphabet. The piano part was written first, followed by the violin part, with the set repeating over and over throughout the separate parts, giving the piece a subconscious hypnotic, near-ritualistic atmosphere.

We're All Here

Daron Hagan

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 Fenimore 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.

Nagoya Marimbas

Steve Reich

Nagoya Marimbas was commissioned by Sekar Sakura of the Nagoya College of Music, in honor of the opening of Shirakawa Hall, and first performing on December 21, 1994 by Sekar Sakura, Yukie Kurihara and Maki Kurihara

Biographies

Elena Kats-Chernin

Elena Kats-Chernin was born in 1957 in the Uzbekistan capital of Tashkent. As a child she received intensive training in both figure skating and music. She entered the New South Wales Conservatory as a pianist and as a composition pupil of Richard Toop. She received a DAAD Fellowship to study with Helmut Lachenmann in Hanover, West Germany. In Europe she became active in theater and ballet, composing for state theatres in Berlin, Vienna, Hamburg and Bochum. Her music attracted the attention of Ensemble Modern; in 1993 the group premiered Clocks. Clocks has since been performed in Europe, Australia and the U.S. Since returning to Australia in 1994, Elena Kats-Chernin has become one of Australia's leading young composers. Among her many commissions are works for the Sydney Alpha Ensemble, Ensemble Modern (Concertino), and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Most recently, millions worldwide heard her music for the opening ceremonies of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games.

John Zorn

John Zorn was born September 2, 1953 in the East Village and has been in touch with the creative environment of Downtown New York most of his life. He learned alchemical synthesis from Harry Smith, structural ontology from Richard Foreman, how to make art out of garbage from Jack Smith, cathartic expression at Sluggs and hermetic intuition from Joseph Cornell. Incredibly prolific, he has written many works drawing upon his experience in a variety of genres, including classical, rock, film, soundtracks, hardcore punk, jazz, easy listening, world music and improvisation, synthesizing them into a music that has continually eluded classification-a music that is directly connected to the tradition of the avant garde, which Zorn posits as an independent genre of its own. His compositions are performed worldwide and he has received numerous commissions from such groups as the New York Philharmonic, Kronos Quartet, Brooklyn Philharmonic, Bayreuth State Opera, WDR Orchestra Kšln, Eos Orchestra and others.

Michael Torke

By any measure, 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. In addition, he is taking an active role in programming and in the RSNO's education program.

Steve Reich

Born in New York and raised there and in California, Steve Reich graduated with honors in philosophy from Cornell University in 1957. For the next two years, he studied composition with Hall Overton; he studied at the Juilliard School of Music with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti. Mr. Reich received his MA in Music from Mills College, where he worked with Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud. In 1966 Steve Reich founded his own ensemble of three musicians, which rapidly grew to 18 members of more. Since 1971, Steve Reich and Musicians have frequently toured the world and have the distinction of performing to sold-out houses at venues as diverse as Carnegie Hall and the Bottom Line Cabaret. He won a Grammy award in 1999 for Best Small Ensemble for his piece Music for 18 Musicians. He has been awarded the Schuman Prize from Columbia University, the Montgomery Fellowship from Dartmouth College, the Regent's Lectureship at the University of California at Berkeley, and honorary doctorate from the California Institute of the Arts and was name Composer of the Year by Musical America magazine.