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Program Notes Presented by The
Katherine K. Herberger College of Fine Arts Mei-Fang Lin: Interaction Interaction is built upon the interaction between the piano and the tape part. These two separate entities, despite their timbral differences, support each other not only by sharing similar motivic ideas, but also by co-creating the energetic field that projects various atmospheres throughout the piece. In another words, this constant interplay of give and take between the two parts take place both in a more local motivic sense and in a more general emotional sense. The piano sometimes gives rise to the tape, and sometimes the other way around. The piece secretly flows in and quietly vanishes after some climatic interaction between the two takes place. ABOUT THE COMPOSER Mei-Fang Lin earned her master's degree in composition from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is currently a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley. She has studied with Guy Garnett, Scott Wyatt, Sever Tipei, and Zack Browning. She is now studying with Edmund Campion. She won a Residence Prize in the "28th Concours International de Musique Electroacoustiques, Bourges" in 2001, the "2001 SCI/ASCAP Student Commission Award", First Prize in "Prix SCRIME 2000" Competition in France, First Prize in the "2000 NACUSA Young Composer's Competition", the "21st Century Piano Commission Competition" in 1999, Special Prize and Honorary Mention in the 1997 and 1998 "Music Taipei Composition Competition" in Taiwan. Her compositions have received numerous performances and broadcast in the United States, Europe, and Asia. She is also very active as a pianist.
In the 16th century a Jesuit priest, Matteo Ricci, brought to China a wonderful memory system that had been used in the West since the days of ancient Greece. To improve their powers of retention, people would build memory palaces, huge imaginary buildings they kept inside their heads. "To everything that we wish to remember," wrote Rici, "we should give an image; and to every one of these images we should assign a position where it can repose peacefully until we are ready to claim it by an act of memory." What intrigued me about this story was the recognition that one of the powers which music possesses for me is the capacity to evoke and capture images of feeling, being, and knowing and to crystallize these images into sonorous forms. As we move through the wold of a musical work, our experience is transformed into memory. The form of The Palaces Of Memory is unfolded through polarities of sections and interludes. Initially it is the synthesized music which functions as accompaniment to or interlude between sections of live music. Increasingly, however, this role is reversed as the instrumental music becomes more ad more the delineator of temporal space between solo sections of tape music. As the work proceeds, the boundaries between the two domains are gradually dissolved as they are intermeshed in a complex net of sonorous images created through the counterpoint of distinct textural and temporal strands. Equipment used in the creation of the tape music included a Kurzweil 2000 digital synthesizer and a Peavy SX-stereo 16 bit sampler. The sections were digitally mixed, using the MTU Microsound Digital/Audio System. I wish to thank Robert Austin who was my collaborator in the production of the tape. The Palaces Of Memory was commissioned by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble and premiered on March 29, 1993. It has been recorded on a Centaur CD by Gerhard Samuel and the Cincinnati Philharmonia. ABOUT THE COMPOSER Composer of a wide variety of works which span solo, chamber, choral, orchestral and electronic media, Diane Thome is the first woman to write computer-synthesized music. Her compositions have been presented in Europe, China, Australia, Israel, Canada and throughout the United States. She has been the guest of the Ecole Nationale Claude Debussy and featured on French radio, composer-in-residence at the University of Sussex and the Bennington Chamber Music Conference and Composers Forum of the East. Recent awards include 1994 Washington Composer of the Year, 1995-6 Solomon Katz Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, and a 1998 International Computer Music Conference Commission. Her collaborative works include Night Passage, an environmental theatre piece presented in the pavilion of the Moore College of Arts in Philadelphia and ANGELS for virtual reality artwork shown at the Biennale des Arts Electroniques in Paris. Her music has been recorded on the CRI, Crystal Records, Opus One, Capstone, and Centaur labels, including Palaces Of Memory, an 18-year retrospective of her electro-acoustic music on the Centaur label. This CD contains five electro-acoustic works including: Masks Of Eternity in four movements for solo tape and The Palaces Of Memory for chamber orchestra and tape. Diane Thome is the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in music from Princeton where she also received an M.F.A. in composition. Other degrees include an M.A. in theory and composition from the University of Pennsylvania and two undergraduate degrees with distinction in piano and composition from the Eastman School of Music. Among her teachers are Dorothy Taubman in piano, Robert Strassburg, Roy Harris, Darius Milhaud, A. U. Boscovich, and Milton Babbitt in composition. Thome has served as composer panelist for the Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and Illinois State Arts Councils; co-chair of the NEA Composer Fellowship program; Regional Chair of the Society of Composers, Inc.; and composer board member of The College Music Society. Dr. Thome has been a UW faculty member since 1977 and is Professor and Chair of the Composition Program in the School of Music of the University of Washington.
Virtual Encounters 2001 is a three movement work for acoustic and virtual instruments. The virtual instruments are performed live from the stage via the Mathews Radio Baton. In REFLECTIONS, acoustic instruments engage in duet, trios, and quartets with their virtual counterparts. In TRANSFIGURATION, overlapping and dissolving tonal harmonies from a virtual string orchestra provide the ambient canvas against which a series of lyric duets are presented. These ensemble passages are framed by the piano encounter that both opens and closes the movement. In PERMEATIONS, the sounds of the acoustic instruments are captured, modified, transformed, and finally diffused in space by the Radio Baton providing the melodic gestures and harmonic textures that serve as the foundation for this frenzied finale. When the work was first commissioned, sketches were done, and plans were made, for 5 movements, but the limits of the technology back then allowed for the completion ABOUT THE COMPOSER Richard Boulanger (born 1956) is a composer and performer of interactive computer music. For more than a decade now, he has collaborated with Max Mathews on the Radio Baton and Barry Vercoe on Csound. Currently, Boulanger is a Professor of Music Synthesis at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He holds a Ph.D.in Computer Music from the University of California, San Diego. As a performing composer, Boulanger has played his music in Moscow, Japan, Canada, throughout Eastern and Western Europe, and all over the United States. His works are on the NEUMA label. Boulanger has received many awards and honors including a Fulbright. In composition his principal teachers have been Hugo Norden and Roger Reynolds. In computer music, he has collaborated extensively with Barry Vercoe and Max Mathews. ABOUT THE RADIO BATON AND CONDUCTOR PROGRAM Developed by the father of computer music - Max Mathews, the RADIO BATON and CONDUCTOR PROGRAM are a system aimed at providing a more expressive way of performing on synthesizers. With the RADIO BATON, the performer moves two wands above a sensor box which sends their X, Y, and Z coordinates to a computer running the CONDUCTOR PROGRAM. The CONDUCTOR PROGRAM automatically supplies the sequence of pre-programmed pitches and durations to be played but leaves the expressive interpretation of the notes to the performer. Like a conductor, the player typically beats time with one baton while using the other to send controller messages which shape the loudness, brightness and articulation of either an individual voice or the entire virtual orchestra.
Holiday Quick Step Dated in the manuscript from "Xmas '87", "Holiday Quick Step" was composed by Charles Ives at the age of thirteen. Probably composed at the piano, the orchestration was done by Ives' father for the town orchestra. The melody is an alteration of the Second Regiment Connecticut National Guard Grand March, illustrating that even at age 13 Ives was already incorporating familiar melodies into his music. This would become the arguably the most recognizable characteristic of Ives' mature compositional style. Heard for the first time from the theater pit of the Danbury Opera House on January 16, 1888, Ives' father conducted the piece as incidental music for a production of the German Drama Association. Two days later, the local paper ran the following review: "ÖThe feature of the eveningÖwas the rendition of the "Holiday Quick Step", composed and arranged [actually, the parts are in George's hand] for an orchestra by Charlie Ives, a thirteen-year-old son of George E. Ives. Master Ives is certainly a musical genius, being an accomplished performer on several instruments, as well as composer and arranger. The "Holiday Quick Step" is worthy a place with the productions of much older heads, and Master Charlie should be encouraged to further efforts in this line. We shall expect more from this talented youngster in the future." Evening Like "Mists", Ives' song setting "Evening" was composed for the 1921 compilation of 114 Songs (pub. 1922). In 1921, Ives arrived at a completed ink score for voice and piano, and included--as he did with "Mists"--thorough instructions for orchestration. The chamber orchestra version was also realized, again, as with "Mists", by Kenneth Singleton in 1974. The first performance of both of these works came on 3 March, 1974--Ives' centenary--in New Haven, Connecticut, by the Yale Theater Orchestra, conducted by James Sinclair. The text for "Mists" comes from John Milton's 1667 masterwork Paradise Lost. The Pond Otherwise known under the title "Remembrance" and "Echo Piece", "The Pond" is a work which has found itself grouped within a variety of different sets and situations. Written in c1906 and revised in c1912, "The Pond" was intended for publication as the second movement of Three Outdoor Scenes. Annotations in Aaron Copland's copy of the 114 Songs--here under the title "Remembrance"--reveal a performance by piano and vocalist of the piece in 1908 within the Chamber Set No. 7: Watercolors. The orchestral version of "The Pond" premiered in April 1934 in New York City as the middle movement of "Interlude for Orchestra". On this occasion, all three movements were performed together as interlude music between dance solos for a young Martha Graham. "The Pond" uncovers the memory of a seminal influence on Ives' compositional style. When he was a boy, Charles' father would play his cornet to Charles from across a local pond, having the young composer report back the effects that the distance and direction and echo would have on the cornet's tone. This memory of his father's cornet echoing into the distance would become a symbol of Ives' entire relationship with his father; indeed, this perspective is evoked in the text f the piece, written by Charles himself: A sound of a distant horn. Mists Composition of a song based on Harmony Ives' (Charles' wife) 1910 poem Mists began that same year, but yielded only two fragmentary sketches. Ives was apparently dissatisfied with this version as in 1920 he prepared a series of sketches outlining a new setting of the same text for his Book of 114 Songs. Though at that time the work existed only for piano and voice, the revised 1920 pencil sketches contained thoroughly annotated projected orchestrations. The chamber orchestra version being performed tonight was edited in 1974 by Ives scholar Kenneth Singleton and thus orchestrated for chamber orchestra after Ives explicit projected orchestrations. "Mists" can be heard in three strata: the subtly shaped vocal melody; the tolling bell of the bass voices; and the streaming planes of augmented harmonic accompaniment. The text was composed by Harmony Ives as a poignant farewell to her mother. Low lie the mists; they hide in each hill and dell; Study No. 9: The Anti-Abolitionist Riots of the 1830'2 and 1840's Composed in 1908, "Study No. 9" is one of the few remaining completed scores of a large set of short piano pieces conceived as a way for Ives to experiment with new compositional ideas concretely in an actual piece. The elaborate title refers to his grandparents'--staunch abolitionists--public defiance of anti-abolitionist riots in New England during the 1830's and 1840's. Ives would apparently retell with much frequency and endless conviction the family story of his grandmother leading a group of women to rescue a captured fugitive slave. Compositionally speaking, the work explores multi-layer planes of heterophonous sound, as well as exploiting massive tone clusters--sometimes up to seven notes in one hand. The Unanswered Question In 1906, Charles Ives jotted down on a single, saturated page of manuscript the first sketch of "The Unanswered Question". The sketch remained filed away into obscurity until 1930, when Ives found it while scavenging through his compositional cast-offs in search of new pieces to present to the public. He revised the work that year, but it again remained tucked away from public ears until its premiere performance in 1946 by a group of graduate students at Julliard. "The Unanswered Question" is comprised of three distinct and seemingly unrelated musical planes: a backdrop of ethereally orchestrated strings cycling slowly though a perplexingly arranged sequence of illusively tonal harmonies; six times over this background, a solo trumpet poses the same vexing and cryptically questioning phrase; responding to this question, a pack of woodwinds retorts a progressively more dissonant and desperate attempt to answer. In his typically extistential perspective, Ives himself dubs the strings as "the silences of the Druids, who know, see, and hear nothing", with the trumpet asking the "perennial question of existence", and the winds offer the "fighting answers". These program notes reveal a central philosophical idea to Ives' writings and music: in considering the mystery of creation, a question can be better than an answer. ABOUT THE COMPOSER Charles Ives (1874-1957) has emerged only in hindsight as one of this nation's most remarkable, influential, and paradoxical composers from the past 100 years. The son of an eccentric and musically experimental band and orchestra director, Ives was exposed very early not only to music in general, but the notion that one could--and should--freely experiment with and hence further develop the musical language. This sense of discovery, as well as his extremely existential perspective (ives was heavily influenced by the writings of Thoreau and Emerson) were the two most apparent characteristics of the body of Ives' life and music. Ives composed almost all of his music between 1900 and 1920, though much it remained unperformed until the 30's and 40's and was only distributed though Ives' own relentless self-publication and promotion. Ives was notably not a composer by trade; rather, he made an impressive fortune as a full-time insurance broker. However, Ives was extremely influential among the most prominent composers of the day (Edgard Varese, Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, among others), both through his experimental musical philosophy as well as providing a substantial amount of funding for his contemporaries' music to be performed and distributed around the world. Ives' style of composition has become both immediately recognizable, yet largely baffling to listeners and scholars alike. His music is at the same time very familiar and very peculiar, extremely complex yet innocent and naive, soothingly gentle and yet bombastic and rude. This compositional style incorporates the use of American folk, pop, and patriotic tunes of the day often either quoted within the context of Ives' own composition, or superimposed over other recognizable tunes simultaneously. This was actually not completely uncommon compositional practice, however Ives distinguished himself by inserting these tunes into his music in a completely unrelated tempo and key, resulting in an often cacophonous musical collage. He used these familiar American tunes non-thematically, as sound "objects" rather than melodic or harmonic developments and was undoubtedly one of the very first--some argue the first composer--to think about music in such terms. Ensemble members Conductor Gary Hill
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