Steven Scott's Bowed Piano Ensemble—January 18, 2004

Santa Fe New Music continued its 2003-2004 season with a concert by the internationally recognized experimental music group The Bowed Piano Ensemble, joined by soprano soloist Victoria Hansen. Their performance of Stephen Scott's Paisajes Audibles/Sounding Landscapes took place Sunday January 18, at 3:00 p.m. at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe.

Premiered at the 2003 Other Minds Festival in San Francisco, Paisajes Audibles/Sounding Landscapes explores the leading edge of performance, creating extraordinarily beautiful sounds accompanied by voice. Soprano Victoria Hansen will sing the prose and poetry of Lorca, Espinoza, and Pedro Perdomo Acedo. A post-concert charla followed this event. "We are thrilled to be bringing one of the most unusual musical ensembles in the world to Santa Fe," says Kennedy. "The Bowed Piano Ensemble makes us rethink the piano, and while rooted in low-tech simplicity, they push the envelope of the new."

About the Bowed Piano Ensemble

The Bowed Piano Ensemble is an elite group of ten student, faculty and staff musicians exploring the leading edge of performance with sounds made directly on the strings of a grand piano which result in an orchestral array of tone colors, harmonies and rhythms. The group has made several international tours, most recently to the Canary Islands in October, along with Ms. Hansen, to present the closing concert of the Festival de Musica Visual on the island of Lanzarote. Their 2002 tour took them to the MaerzMusik Festival (Berlin) and the ppIANISSIMO Festival (Sofia, Bulgaria), as well as to Prague, Wolfsburg and St. Louis. In September 2002 the Ensemble was featured on National Public Radio's "Sonic Memorial Project" commemorating the people and neighborhoods of the World Trade Center, where they had performed Scott's music shortly before the destruction of September 11, 2001.

The Ensemble's 1996 recording of Scott's Vikings of the Sunrise for New Albion Records has been the subject of several other programs on National Public Radio, including "All Things Considered," "Weekend Edition," and "Art Beat." Vikings of the Sunrise was hailed by Billboard Magazine as "...the first truly provocative work of new music for the '90s," and by Keyboard Magazine as "...vividly evocative." Tom Manoff of "All Things Considered" called the work "... brilliant...if you can sail these mythic waters, you're in for quite a journey." The Ensemble's most recent recording is a compact disk re-issue of Scott's post-minimalist classic New Music for Bowed Piano, favorably reviewed by The American Record Guide ("...intensely resourceful music"), Wired Magazine and other publications.

About Victoria Hansen

Victoria Hansen appears often in operatic roles and as a recitalist. She has taught private voice in Colorado Springs since 1980, and joined the Colorado College Music Department as Principal Instructor of Voice in 2000. As a company singer for Opera Theatre of the Rockies, Ms. Hansen has recently appeared as Nella in Gianni Schicchi, as The Witch in Hansel and Gretel, and as the Grisette, Fifi, in The Merry Widow. She enjoyed a 20-year relationship with the Colorado Opera Festival, being featured in such productions as The Ballad of Baby Doe, La Traviata, The Stoned Guest, and The Old Maid and the Thief. Ms. Hansen has also delighted music theater audiences, most recently in a production of Side by Side by Sondheim, and has been soloist with numerous symphonic and choral ensembles. Her solo concert, In the Company of Composers, showcased new music by her colleagues at Colorado College, and she has twice toured Europe with the Bowed Piano Ensemble. During the past three summers she has premiered works by several international composers at the New Music Symposium of Colorado College.

About Stephen Scott

Stephen Scott joined the Colorado College music faculty in 1969. He has also taught at The Evergreen State College and as visiting composer at Eastman School of Music, Aspen Music School, New England Conservatory, Princeton University, University of Southern California, and at festivals and conservatories in Germany, Estonia, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Ireland, Norway, England, Canary Islands and Australia. Awards include a Barlow Endowment Commission, a grant from the Peter S. Reed Foundation, the New England Conservatory/Rockefeller Foundation Chamber Music Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts Composer's Fellowship.

Program Notes

Paisajes Audibles/Sounding Landscapes is a kind of song-cycle fantasy celebrating various landscapes, both physical and imagined, both natural and cultural, of Lanzarote, easternmost of the Canary Islands. I was inspired to make this work not only as a personal manifestation of my affection for Lanzarote, which I have now visited three times, but also in response to two other sources: the evocative visual art of painter/photographer Ildefonso Aguilar, Founder and Director of the Visual Music Festival, whose recent series of paintings, Paisajes Audibles, provides my title; and works by various writers, including Plato, Lorca and Agustín Espinosa, who have examined ideas of landscape and the humans who are shaped by it and shape it in turn.

My work for the past twenty-five years has centered on the bowed piano, a medium primarily of my own devising but influenced also by the discoveries of other experimentalists such as Henry Cowell, John Cage, and Curtis Curtis-Smith. Most of the sounds are made directly on the strings of the open grand piano using a variety of materials and tools; among these are nylon fishline, horsehair, guitar picks and fingernails, piano hammers, percussion mallets and specially-designed piano mutes.

The music also owes a huge stylistic debt to the thinking of Terry Riley and Steve Reich, as well as to various world musics, especially West African music, jazz and flamenco.

Paisajes Audibles/Sounding Landscapes is my first major work to integrate the human voice with the Bowed Piano Ensemble. The texts sung and spoken by the soprano (and occasionally by the players) are in English, Spanish and French (see translations). Most are self-explanatory, but perhaps that by Augustín Espinoza (Lancelot 28¾ - 7¾) could benefit from some explication.

There has long been said to be a connection between Lanzarote and Lancelot, the fabled knight of King Arthur's court. One of the medieval romances from about 1220 A.D. states that Sir Lancelot and his son Sir Galahad spent six months wandering aboard a seagoing ship, and "...many times they came to distant islands, populated by nothing but wild animals, and they encountered extraordinary adventures, which they achieved, whether by their prowess or by the grace of the Holy Spirit, who was always with them." (I am grateful to Prof. Norris Lacy of Pennsylvania State University for this citation and translation.)

In 1928 Espinosa imagined, perhaps based on this passage, a visit to the latitude and longitude of Lanzarote by Sir Lancelot during his quest for the Holy Grail; Espinosa invented a kind of creation myth in which Lancelot arrived from northern climes with ten ships flying his heraldic pennants, installed a fire-breathing dragon in the center of the island (today the dormant volcanoes of the Montañas del Fuego), dug large caves (today Cueva de los Verdes and Jameos del Agua), and built many castles, some of which still stand. He accomplished all of this in six days, and on the septima alba (dawn of the seventh day) he, like God, rested. He lived the remainder of his days in splendid isolation, contemplating the Atlantic monotony of blue sea and white castles, reading widely in the heroic tales of Homer, Virgil, Lucan and Apolonius of Rhodes, imagining himself as Odysseus and prefiguring the exile, on another African island in the Atlantic, of a later hero: Napoleon of St. Helena.

The piece is dedicated to Ildefonso Aguilar and Charles Amirkhanian, two of contemporary music's most visionary presenters; Aguilar's work has given life to Harry Partch's dictum that "the eye explains to the ear and the ear fulfills the vision"; and Amirkhanian has for decades been teaching Americans, musicians and listeners alike, much of what we need to know about our own new music and about each other.

– Stephen Scott