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iChamber Players: Program Notes Daniel Lentz: California Family for Violin, Piano and Percussion Violin: Jonathan Swartz Matt Malsky: Ancient Devices for clarinet and interactive electronics Clarinet: Robert Spring Clifton Callender: Relativity for String Quartet Violins: Katie McLin, Jonathan Swartz INTERMISSION Beth Wiemann: Fables of La Fontaine for tenor and chamber ensemble Tenor: David Britton
Violin: Katie McLin
Tenor: David Britton
While a student at Brandeis University Daniel Lentz was awarded a composition fellowship to work at Tanglewood in the summer of 1966. In 1967-68 he was a Fulbright Fellow (in Electronic Music) in Stockholm, Sweden. In 1968 he accepted a visiting lecturership at the University of California at Santa Barbara. In 1970 he began devoting his time to composition and performance, founding and directing the California Time Machine, a conceptual music ensemble based in Santa Barbara. The CTM made tours of the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe. Lentz also founded and directed the San Andreas Fault, an ensemble comprised of voices, keyboards and real-time electronics. The SAF made several tours of the U.S., Great Britain. Scandanavia, and Western Europe. The ensemble also recorded for many European radio companies. In Los Angeles Lentz founded and directed the Daniel Lentz Group. The DLG has made many tours of the U.S., Eastern and Western Europe, and Asia. The ensemble has played a principle role in many commercial CD recordings and several TV features. Its instrumentation has varied over the16 years of its existence, from as few as 4 performers to as many as 18. The DLG was especially prominent in its revolutionary use of "live multi-track recording" in its performances in the 1980s and early 1990s. In 1972 Lentz won the First Prize in the International Composers Competition (Stichting Gaudeamus) in Holland, the second American to do so in the then 37-year history of that event. In 1979 Lentz received a D.A.A.D. residency grant to live and work in West Berlin. He has been the recipient of numerous other awards, grants, and commissions. Lentz was the first Los Angeles-based composer since Stravinsky to sign with a major record label (Angel-EMI)..... His On The Leopard Altar (Icon Records) was named "most favorite" classical record album in a LA Weekly poll and received more readers' votes than all others combined. .... LA Style Magazine. In MOJO Magazine Paul McCartney called On The Leopard Altar "a crazy record..... that should have been a hit. " Lentz's music from his years in Los Angeles is generally fast-paced and upbeat -- like L.A. itself (as heard in Talk Radio, Wild Turkeys, the crack in the bell, et al). Since moving from Los Angeles to the Sonoran Desert in Arizona Lentz's music has undergone a major metamorphosis. Recent works, such as the Temple of Lament, Apologetica, A Tiger In The Garden, and The Insect & The Woman, reflect these changes. These works evoke the desert and inspire the listener in their sometimes mournful, musical intensity. California Family is a group portrait of the Robert and Linda Attiyeh family of Los Angeles, who commissioned the work for the Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio. The structure or form of the piece was inspired by certain cubist portraits by Picasso, and by David Hockney's photo collage works of the 1980s (e.g., Pearblossom Hignway). Hockney once explained to me his "cubist-like" approach to photographing a chair, which he accomplished via numerous close-up shots of all the various parts of the chair from every possible angle. He then reassembled these photos onto a flat two-dimensional surface, forming a multi-faceted image of the chair. Like Picasso's pictures of human faces and figures, one is able to see and experience a three-dimensional image within the confines of two dimensions. In other words, one can see Hockney's chair from all angles at the same time and in the same space. This is similar to the approach I have taken with California Family. I first created about 100 "close-up" musical units -- which are actually small, complete or nearly complete pieces in themselves -- and then assembled them into the shape that has become the finished work. My goal was to create a cubist music, a music without structural repetition (which is the basis of most, if not all, musical forms). All digital samples used in the "shadow D.A.T." were made from the sounds of the violin, piano, and percussion instruments of the Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio. Matthew Malsky has composed concert works for soloist and mixed chamber ensembles, often with live and pre-recorded electronics, and soundtracks for film and video. His works have been performed throughout the United States, Europe, Asia and Australia by ensembles such as the Contemporary Chamber Players at the University of Chicago, the Minnesota Composers Forum, the Musik Factory (Norway), on the radio in Buffalo, St. Paul, and Toronto, and at numerous international contemporary music festivals. He received the doctorate in composition from the University of Chicago where he studied with Howard Sandroff, Ralph Shapey and Shulamit Ran. He is an Assistant Professor of Music at Clark University (Worcester, MA USA) where he serves as Director of the Computer Music Studio/Multimedia Lab. The title Ancient Devices is a double allusion, both descriptive and ironic. The piece invokes one of the earliest descriptions of rhetorical speech as its formal model. Corax of Syracuse, the founder of the ìartî of rhetoric, divided organized discourse ó here the sections of the composition ó into five parts: proem, narrative, arguments, subsidiary remarks and peroration. The Proem (or preliminary comments) presents the themes, amplified through two canons, and introduces the extension of the clarinet with electronics. The Narrative rhapsodically develops the opening assertions. More tightly structured, the Arguments section uses the computer to provide the clarinetist with an asymmetric ostinato against which the clarinet material is phased. The computer takes over the floor for further expansion in the Subsidiary Remarks. Finally, the clarinetist has a last word in summary in the Perorations. Ironically, these ìancient devicesî are realized here using a not-so-ancient device to accompany the clarinet. The digital signal processing computer software for this piece was written in Max/MSP and runs on a Macintosh computer. The sounds produced by the computer are live manipulations of the performed clarinet. The computer modifies and supplements the clarinet to provide a musical foil which amplifies, grounds, and broadens the acoustic instrument. Ancient Devices was commissioned and premiered by Howard Sandroff and John Bruce Yeh of Double Dialogue. Clifton Callender is an assistant professor of music theory and composition. Through the support of a Whiting Fellowship, Cliff received his Ph.D. in composition at the University of Chicago in December of 1999, where he studied with Shulamit Ran, Andrew Imbrie, and Marta Ptaszynska. He has also studied composition with Jean Eichelberger Ivey and Computer Music with Geoffrey Wright and McGregor Boyle at the Peabody Conservatory, Peter Dickinson at King's College, London, and Barbara Jazwinski at Tulane University, and piano with Faina Lushtak. His music has been recognized by and performed at the National Association of Composers USA Young Composers Competition, Northern Arizona University Centennial Composition Competition, the Composers Conference at Wellesley College, the Ernest Bloch Music Festival, the 2nd ppIANISSIMO festival in Bulgaria, the University of Chicago Contemporary Chamber Players Concert Series, the Society for Composers, Inc. Regional and Student conferences, the Society for Electroacoustic Music in the United States, the Fifth World Harp Congress in Copenhagen, and the Chicago Union League Civic & Arts Foundation. His orchestral work "Visage" received a reading by the American Composers Orchestra as part of the Whitaker New Music Reading Sessions. Relativity is the final movement of a three-movement work for string quartet, Lominous Signals. This movement explores the simultaneous presentation of different tempos, a technique explored in the wonderful player-piano music of Conlon Nancarrow. In relativity this idea is extended to multiple interpretations of an accelerando. All four instruments begin in the same, slow tempo and accelerate to an ending tempo which is three times as fast, but every instrument accelerates independently. The first violin accelerates quickly near the beginning and gradually decreases the rate of acceleration throughout, while the cello voice mirrors this process, accelerating slowly at first and gradually increasing the rate of acceleration. The second violin and viola have a similar relation existing between the tempo extremes of the first violin and cello. A repeating theme (the end of which is marked by a pronounced glissando) aids in the perception of this tempo structure. The specific tempo contours are designed so that all four voices end at precisely the same moment, in the same tempo, and at the very end of their respective repetition of the theme. In addition, there are two episodes and a substantial development of the theme in its final occurrence, yielding a formal design which hovers somewhere between canon, round, and rondo. Beth Wiemann was raised in Burlington, VT, studied composition and clarinet at Oberlin College and received her PhD in theory and composition from Princeton University. Her works have been performed in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Washington DC, the Dartington Festival (UK), the "Spring in Havana 2000 Festival (Cuba), and elsewhere by the ensembles Continuum, Parnassus, Earplay, ALEA III, singers Paul Hillier, Susan Narucki, DíAnna Fortunato and others.† Her compositions have won awards from the Colorado New Music Festival, American Women Composers, and Marimolin as well as various arts councils, and this past year she won the Vocal Composition Prize from the Orvis Foundation. A founding member of Griffin Music Ensemble, a contemporary music group in Boston, she premiered many clarinet works and conducted composer-in-the-schools workshops in the Boston and Worcester public schools. After teaching at the College of the Holy Cross and Salisbury State University, she now teaches at the University of Maine. In addition to clarinet instruction, her work at UMaine includes teaching Orchestration, Tonal Counterpoint, Twentieth Century Musical Techniques, Composition, and Graduate -level theory seminars. She has performed throughout New England and will be touring with the Empyrean Ensemble next spring on the West Coast in a concerto written for her by David Rakowski. La Fontaine's fables were marked by his love of rural life and belief in ethical hedonism. They were widely translated and imitated during the 17th and 18th centuries all over Europe, and beyond. Read nowadays mainly by children - or by teachers for their classes - their original amoral attitude has been forgotten. This realistic side was still noticed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) who considered them unfit for pedagogy. In America, the tradition of the verse fable continued in Joel Chadler Harris' Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880). At the age of 71 La Fontaine became ill, and he started to think seriously his life. He translated the Psalms, used a hair cloth shirt, and again embraced Catholicism. This new role did not convince his friends, whom he had convinced that pleasure is one's "primal and congenital good." La Fontaine died in Paris on April 13, 1695. Before his death La Fontaine was encouraged by his abbÈ to condemn publicly his indecent stories. "Stop tormenting him; he's much more stupid than wicked," said the writer's housekeeper, but La Fontaine obeyed the advice and also burned a comedy he had just composed. Bela Bartok (1881-1945) was born in Nagyzentmiklos, Hungary, and died in New York. He was one of the greatest composers of his country and was responsible, with his friend Kodaly, for the awakening of serious interest in the folk music of Hungary, the Balkans, and Turkey. The many years he spent in the pursuit of folk melodies resulted in important critical editions of thousands of these melodies. At the same time, his absorption in folk music inevitably helped to form his style as a composer, making him in a sense, a twentieth-century nationalist The Contrasts for Violin, Clarinet and Piano (1938) was commissioned by violinist Joseph Szigeti, a firend of Bartok's, and clarinetist Benny Goodman. The work is actually a trio for five instruments as the clarinetist is required to play both the Bb and A clarinets and the violinist is required to use a mistuned violin in the third movement with the E string lowered a half step and the G string raised a half step. The Contrasts include Hungarian nationalistic trends as well as certain jazz coloring. Several recordings of the Benny Goodman band were sent to Bartok by Szigeti prior to the completion of the work, coloring his view of Goodman's playing. Examples of this include the scale choice made by Bartok in the first movement. This scale utilizes a lydian lower part with a mixolydian upper part giving it a raised 4th and lowered 7th. This scale is remarkably close to a blues scale. Other jazz colorings include the use of the extreme high register of the clarinet, so much a part of Goodman's playing Hungarian nationalist influences include the titles of the three movements and the presence of different Hungarian rhythmic patterns. The characteristic Magyar triplet rhythm of short-long, short-long is heard frequently in the first movement as well as in the 8/8 = 5/8 Hungarian flavored tune found in the third movement. That the work was commissioned by two virtuoso performers of the time is evidenced by the two difficult cadenzas, one each for the clarinet and the violin found in the first and third movements respectively. |
