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SYNERGY

Tuesday Mar. 18 2008 7:30 pm     Thursday Mar. 20 2008 7:30 pm

Program Notes

Elliot Carter celebrates his 100th birthday later this year; he continues to write works of extraordinary power and imagination. Carter studied at Harvard, the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris and privately with Nadia Boulanger. He early works leaned toward the music Stravinsky and Hindemith. Although he was acquainted with the music of Schoenberg, Varèse and Ives, it wasn’t until the late forties that he began to loosen the hold of tonality in his music. His music also often gives instruments distinct roles. This is a distinctly American characteristic of his art, and in his works the individual instrument maintains its distinctness even while part of an ensemble. This is results in music full of complex rhythmic interplay and unusual forms. Among his many honors, Carter has received the Pulitzer Prize in music twice, for his Second and Third String Quartets. He lives in New York City.

Gra is dedicated to the Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski. Although for only one instrument, Carter still invokes the struggle of the individual in the piece. As Anthony Bye has observed, the solo clarinet’s attempts at expressive freedom are thwarted by the limited pitch material Carter uses in the work.

Steve Reich was recently called “America’s greatest living composer.” (The Village VOICE), “...the most original musical thinker of our time” (The New Yorker) and “...among the great composers of the century” (The New York Times). Mr. Reich’s path has embraced not only aspects of Western Classical music, but the structures, harmonies, and rhythms of non-Western and American vernacular music, particularly jazz. Born in New York and raised there and in California, Reich studied composition with Hall Overton, at the Juilliard School with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti, and with Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud at Mills College. He also studied drumming at the Institute for African Studies at the University of Ghana in Accra, Balinese Gamelan at the American Society for Eastern Arts in Seattle and Berkeley, California, and the traditional forms of cantillation (chanting) of the Hebrew scriptures in New York and Jerusalem. In 1966 Steve Reich founded his own ensemble of three musicians, which rapidly grew to 18 members or 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. Performing organizations around the world marked Steve Reich's 70th- birthday year, 2006, with festivals and special concerts.

The composer writes:
New York Counterpoint was a continuation of ideas found in Vermont Counterpoint (1982, for flute), in which a soloist plays against a prerecorded tape of ten clarinet and bass clarinet parts, and then plays a final eleventh part live against the tape. New York Counterpoint is in three movements – fast, slow, fast – played straight through without a pause. The change of tempo is abrupt and in the simple relation 1:2. The piece is in 12/8 meter and exploits the ambiguity between whether one hears measures of three groups of four eighth-notes, or four groups of three eighth-notes. In the last movement, the function of the bass clarinet is to accent first one and then the other of these possibilities, while the upper clarinets essentially do not change. The effect is to vary the perception of what is in fact not changing. New York Counterpoint was composed for the clarinetist Richard Stolzman.

Yehudi Wyner has created a diverse body of over 60 works include compositions for orchestra, chamber ensembles, solo voice and solo instruments, and music for the theater, as well as liturgical services for worship. His piano concerto, Chiavi in mano, won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Music. A composer, pianist, conductor, and educator, Wyner was born in 1929 in Western Canada, but grew up in New York City. He studied at the Juilliard School, Yale and Harvard Universities with composers Richard Donovan, Walter Piston, and Paul Hindemith. He has taught at Yale University, SUNY Purchase, Cornell University, and Harvard. He is currently on the faculty of Brandeis University.
The composer writes:

The impulse for the creation of a new composition for clarinet and piano came from Richard Stoltzman. He wanted something to help him celebrate a significant birthday, something he could receive and participate in, but also something he could pass on to others. He also wanted to share this experience with his treasured colleague, Emanuel Ax.
As I began working on the piece I had no idea what its form or shape would be. But I felt that it must begin on a note of high - even frantic - energy and that the organizing motivic sonority would be a major seventh enclosing a minor third. (In recognition of the cascading onslaught of the opening attack, the tempo direction is “LABOOH” a mysterious word of obscure origin, possibly derived from the expression: “Like A Bat Out Of Hell”.) Eventually the motoric thrust runs out of steam and undergoes a transformation into something more suspended and expressive. This is followed by a lengthy stretch of music that is lyric and flexible, with the clarinet and piano engaging each other in melodic and figurative exchanges. The harmony is rich and progressively inflected, but the music is never just one thing: it is in constant flux, now amorous, now insistent, now timid and hesitant, now despairing. There is a brief chorale with commentary, and a semi-improvised scherzando duet. The music moves towards a passionate climax, and then recedes into private sadness, as if in reminiscence. Almost as an afterthought, the quick music of the opening is brought back as if to say: perhaps it was only a joke!

Dante called his poem La Commedia because “in the conclusion, it is prosperous, pleasant and desirable,” and in its style, “lax and unpretending... written in the vulgar tongue in which women and children speak.” I infer from this that not all of La Commedia is sweetness and light, and that the style avoids learned pedantry and embraces the vernacular, the direct and unpretentious language of everyday speech.

Libby Larsen is one of America's most performed living composers. She has created a catalogue of over 220 works, spanning virtually every genre, and her works are widely performed and recorded. She was born in 1950 in Wilmington, Delaware, grew up in Minnesota, and attended the University of Minnesota. In 1973 Larsen co-founded the Minnesota Composers Forum, now the American Composer's Forum, which has become an invaluable aid for composers in a difficult, transitional time for American arts. Currently the holder of the Papamarkou Chair at John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress, Larsen has held residencies with the Minnesota Orchestra, the Charlotte Symphony and the Colorado Symphony. She is currently completing a book, The Concert Hall That Fell Asleep and Woke Up as a Car Radio.

The composer writes:
Song Without Words was composed as a musical epitaph for Richard Lamberton, a beloved friend and gentle, deeply kind man who loved music and had a particular love for the clarinet. Over a period of twenty-five years, I came to know Richard Lamberton through my friendship with his children, Deborah and Dodd. He was always at our school concerts, a supporting and nurturing father – the parent who waited with his compliments and questions until the excitement of the concert cleared away all well-wishers, leaving the ever-faithful parents to drive us home. Richard loved music for its quiet strength and depth. I hope to capture that same quiet strength and depth in Song Without Words.

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