The annual concert this year joined forces with our "Spotlight On..."
event in a sensational evening featuring harpsichordist Kathleen McIntosh
and violinist Robin Lorentz, in legendary works by Arvo Pärt, John
Cage, and Ned Rorem, as well as newer works by Barbara Monk Feldman, Alex
Shapiro, and others. The concert took place at the Unitarian Universalist
Church, 107 W. Barcelona, 8 pm.
Program Notes
John Cage uses very few notes in Six
Melodies, and focuses instead on rhythm contrasted with silence.
When we adapted these works from piano and violin to harpsichord and violin,
we thought that these essential qualities, and a sense of sparseness,
were brought into even sharper relief.
Cage is very specific in his instructions to the players, dictating bow
stroke, volume, duration and timbre of virtually every note. Sometimes
he is explicit even about which string must be played to produce the note,
often not the choice the player would make for greatest ease. He knows
exactly the quality of sound, and sometimes of tension, that he wants
us to produce.
Gyorgi Ligeti's Passacaglia uses as its model
the passacaglias of the 1600s, with their gradually increasing divisions
of time with each variation. Ligeti even suggests using mean tone tuning,
which we are sadly unable to do for this concert.
Tomiko Kohjiba was commissioned by the Santa Fe Chamber
Music Festival to write Transmigrations of the Soul in l995.
I really loved that work, and we were delighted when she agreed to write
a piece for us. It is based on the legend of Sedona:
Sedona was a beautiful but vain Inuit girl who turned down countless
proposals of marriage because she thought that she was too beautiful
to marry just anyone. But finally her father said to her "Sedona,
we are going hungry, and you must marry the next man who will have you
so that you will have a husband to take care of you." Soon after,
a hunter entered the camp, and although his face was covered, he appeared
to be very well-to-do. Sedona's father quickly married her off to the
stranger, and over her protests, she was packed off in a kayak with
her husband to her new home.
Her home turned out to be a bleak cliff, all rocks and boulders
with no tent or sod hut. The hunter pulled off his hood, and revealed
with an evil laugh that he was not a man at all, but a raven. Sedona
screamed and tried to run, but he grabbed her and dragged her to a clearing
in the rocks, and there he brought her nothing more than raw fish to
eat. Sedona was miserable, and she cried and cried and called her father's
name.
Through the howling arctic winds, Sedona's father heard her cries,
and he felt great remorse. So he provisioned his kayak and set out on
a journey of many days to rescue her. When he reached the rocks, Sedona
was waiting for him, and they quickly paddled away. But Sedona saw the
black form of her angry husband searching for her, and the raven swooped
down on the kayak and tried to seize her. Sedona's father tried to hit
the raven with his paddle, but the great bird swooped down again and
touched his wing to the ocean.
Immediately a terrible storm arose. Sedona's father was terrified,
and thought only of his own safety. He grabbed Sedona and threw her
overboard into the sea. Sedona screamed and struggled, and she grabbed
the side of the boat. But her father struck her hands and fingers with
the paddle, trying to break her hold. Her frozen fingers cracked and
broke off, and fell into the sea, where they became seals. Then her
frozen hands, too, cracked and fell into the ocean, and as the stumps
reached the bottom, they became the whales. Finally, Sedona lost the
energy to fight on, and she, too, began to sink to the ocean floor.
Sedona, raging with anger, did not die. Instead, she became and
still is the goddess of the ocean. From time to time she creates vicious
storms in her anger at what happened to her, and the hunters all respect
her. Her companions are the seals and the whales.
In his "New York Diary" of the l950s, Ned Rorem writes
about lying on his bed on a stifling summer afternoon, pre-air-conditioning,
watching the spiders running about on the ceiling of his room. He captured
that memory in this piece, Spiders, for Igor Kipnis.
Barbara Monk Feldman writes:
"The Northern Shore consists of two versions: one for
piano, percussion, and violin, and the other for piano, percussion,
and orchestra. The music was composed so that the violin part may be
substituted by an orchestra. The focus for the piano and percussion
in both versions was the variation and overlapping of tones and registers
so that a process of shading occurred in the color of the overtones
for these instruments. The violin part and its orchestral substitution
developed from this shading and from the alternation of sound and silence
between the piano and percussion.
"Both the violin and the orchestra parts were composed with their
substituted versions in mind. In the orchestral version, there was an
experiment with the way different tones and registers combined so as
to reflect the color of a solo violin. In the trio version, the registration
of the violin was projected from varying foreground and background levels
that were sometimes unaligned with those of the piano and percussion;
this gave the violin a quality as though of separation in time from
the other two instruments. I wanted the sense the violin was being projected
through the center of the color of a larger orchestral violin section,
or through the color of the other "absent" sections of the
orchestra. In this way the composing of one version played an intrinsic
part in the composing of the other. The change of light, or instrumental
color, that was the result of alternating material between the two versions
became a focus for both.
"Part of the music was composed at a summer residence near the
Gaspé peninsula in Quebec, where the St. Lawrence River widens
to the sea. There the northern shore appears across the water as a distant
sliver of land. Depending on the intensity of the light during the day,
this shoreline changes its contour, sometimes disappears and sometimes
reappears as a mirage."
Alex Shapiro was educated at The Juilliard School and
Manhattan School of Music. She studied composition with Ursula Mamlok
and John Corigliano. About Slip she writes:
"Slip was commissioned by Robn Lorentz as a gift for
her friend and partner in msical crimes, Kathleen McIntosh. Both women
persist in the marvelous delusion that the l8th Century's winning combo
of harpsichord and violin deserves a repertoire from the 21st as well.
Far be it from me to argue such an inspired position, and so, knowing
that my dear comrade Robin can make a violin sing beautifully in every
style imaginable, I came up with the idea of giving Kathy everything
and anything to play, with the one exception of the baroque style to
which she was so often tethered. I attempted to convert the harpsichord
into many other plectrum instruments, including (but not limited to)
dulcimer, koto, mandolin, guitar and bouzouki. Throw in some Cuban montuno
rhythms for a little variety, and suddenly it's a world tour for anyone
with attention deficit disorder.
"This bit of whimsy was written with the intent of giving the
two of them something that would be unexpected at the close of their
otherwise respectable concerts."
