 |
 |
 |
|||||||||||
 |
 |
||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||||
|
|
||||||||||||
Sarah Cahill: Ladies First— Friday, March 3, 2005, Unitarian Universalist Church, 8 pmSanta Fe New Music’s 5th Anniversary Season continued on March 3 and 4 with concerts by one of the legendary performers of American new music, Bay Area pianist Sarah Cahill. Cahill’s March 3 program spanned 70 years of music, and in honor of Women’s History Month, includes works from the 1930’s with work by musical pioneers Johanna Beyer and Ruth Crawford. Beyer was brought to the attention of the music world in 1988 when SFNM’s Artistic Director, John Kennedy, presented in New York the first ever programs of her music. Crawford was one of the most original American composers of the 1930’s before she devoted herself to folk music and serving as the matriarch of the Seeger family. In honor of Crawford, Cahill presented three works she commissioned in 2001 for the Crawford centenary, by leading women composers Annea Lockwood, Pauline Oliveros, and Maggie Payne. The concert also includedWalk in Beauty by former Santa Fean Peter Garland, a variation on the Beatles’ Julia by Bunita Marcus, and Time Does Not Exist, by the leading composer Kyle Gann, whose work SFNM featured in a 2004 retrospective. The audience was treated to new works by Guy Klucevsek and Andrea Morricone (the Italian film composer and son of Ennio) – the Santa Fe performances were only the second performance of each work. MARCH 3 PROGRAM: Kyle Gann – Time Does Not Exist (2000)
Sarah Cahill was recently praised in the Village Voice for “her phenomenal technique, her instinctive command of recent aesthetics, and quite possibly the most interesting repertoire of any pianist around.” She specializes in new American music as well as the American experimental tradition, and has commissioned, premiered, and recorded numerous compositions for solo piano. Composers who have dedicated works to her include John Adams, Terry Riley, Annea Lockwood, Kyle Gann, Pauline Oliveros, and Evan Ziporyn, and she has also premiered pieces by Lou Harrison, Julia Wolfe, Ingram Marshall, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Ursula Mamlok, George Lewis, Leo Ornstein, and many others. Cahill is particularly fascinated by how the early 20th-century American modernists have influenced composers working today. She has explored these musical lineages in numerous concert programs, the most ambitious being a three-day festival celebrating the centennial of Henry Cowell in 1997. For the 2001 centennial of Ruth Crawford Seeger, she commissioned seven composers, all women, to write short homage pieces, which she has performed at Merkin Hall, Dartmouth College, the Cincinnati Conservatory, and at Hampshire College in Amherst. For another project, Playdate, she has commissioned composers including Lois V Vierk and John Kennedy for a concert especially designed for children. She enjoys working closely with composers, musicologists, and scholars to prepare scores for performance. She has performed at the Phillips Collection, the Other Minds Festival, Pacific Crossings Festival in Tokyo, and at the Spoleto Festival USA. Recent appearances include the Tokyo Summer Festival and the Nuovi Spazi Musicali festival in Rome. For a “new music seance” produced by Other Minds, she performed three separate concert programs back to back, spanning music from the early 20th century to the present day. Sarah and pianist Joseph Kubera appear frequently as a duo; they recently premiered a set of four-hand pieces by Terry Riley at UCLA’s Royce Hall. This season Sarah has recitals scheduled in the Santa Fe New Music series and at a Cold Blue festival at Redcat Theater in Los Angeles. Sarah’s albums of works by Ravel and Cowell are on the New Albion label, which also released her recording of Ruth Crawford’s Preludes and Piano Study in Mixed Accents and two suites by the virtually unknown experimental composer Johanna Beyer. She has also recorded for the Tzadik, CRI, New World, Albany, Artifact, and Cold Blue labels. She is currently preparing recordings of music by Leo Ornstein, Ingram Marshall, Evan Ziporyn, Kyle Gann, and Mamoru Fujieda. Her radio show, Then & Now, can be heard every Sunday evening from 8 to 10 pm on KALW, 91.7 FM. Program NotesKyle Gann: Time Does Not Exist —“In the subconscious,” wrote Sigmund Freud, “time does not exist.” The work uses a variety of rhythmic and harmonic devices to try to make the forward progression of time seem illusory. — Kyle Gann
Bunita Marcus: Julia — The composer writes: “In arranging this work for piano I wished only to enhance the beauty of the original and not introduce any atonal or foreign elements.” John Lennon wrote the Beatles’ song Julia about his mother, Julia Stanley. His father deserted them when John was a baby, and after a few years his mother moved in with a new boyfriend. Thinking the atmosphere unsuitable for a five-year-old boy, Julia’s sister Mimi called Social Services and had John Lennon taken from Julia’s house. John grew up with Mimi and only started visiting his mother when he was in his early teens. She encouraged his interest in music and taught him to play the banjo. John Lennon was eighteen when Julia was hit by a car and killed, on her way home from visiting Mimi. She was 44. John Lennon named his son Julian after her. Bunita Marcus says: “I identified with this song because I too have a Julia to whom I’m forever indebted.” The words spoken by the pianist at the beginning of the piece are from the text of Lennon’s song: seashell eyes sleeping sand windy smile silent cloud morning moon ocean child touch me
Peter Garland: Walk in Beauty — The conceptual basis of Walk in Beauty is found in the all-night peyote ceremonies of the Native American Church and the curing ceremonies of the Navajo. There is also a simple musical correlation: in the fast, nervous repetition of single notes, and their high pitch registration (as in the first section) can be heard the influence of peyote drumming and musical style. The movements follow a hypothetical sunset to sunrise time cycle, and are dedicated to close friends. Movement One is in three parts: (1) “Walk in Beauty” (opening song) for Aki Takahashi; (2)”Turquoise Trail: In memoriam Louise Varèse” (sunset song); and (3) “A Peyote Fan” (night song) for Lou Harrison and William Colvig. Movement Two is subtitled “A Pine-Pitch Basket” (midnight song), after the baskets covered with pitch used as water vessels in the Southwest, and is dedicated to Susan Ohori. Movement Three is in two sections: (1) “Lightning Flash” (rumba-not really) for Conlon “El Rey” Nancarrow (night song); and (2) “Walk in Beauty (Calling Home My Shadow)” for Peter Garland — myself (sunrise song). The piece was written from August 15 to October 31, 1989. — Peter Garland
Johanna Beyer was a German who moved to New York in 1924 to pursue her study of composition. An acquaintance of Ruth Crawford and other American avant-gardists, Beyer composed prolifically in the 1930’s, with notable works being her quietly mystic percussion ensemble works and her String Quartet No. 2. Her work was lost in oblivion, stored in manuscript in the New York Public Library, until John Kennedy organized a two-concert centenary retrospective of her work in New York in 1988, premiering many works composed 50 years earlier. Gradually, her works are being published by Frog Peak Music and finding performances, and in 1996, Musical Quarterly published a 60-page examination of her work by Kennedy and Larry Polansky. Dissonant Counterpoint is named for the theory of modern music that Crawford and her husband Charles Seeger developed. For an overview about Beyer written in 1988 by Kennedy, click here.—John Kennedy
Guy Klucevsek: Don’t Let the Boogie Man Get You was composed in January of 2005. Guy Klucevsek would like to thank the The Sally and Don Lucas Artists Programs at Montalvo (Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, CA) for the artist residency during which it was written. —Sarah Cahill
Andrea Morricone: Etude No. 1 — Andrea Morricone dedicated this piece to his mother for her birthday. Each of the first two sections uses a kind of variation form, and the entire piece is played on the white keys. Morricone says that his compositional style has changed considerably in the three years since writing this piece. Like his father, Ennio Morricone, he has written scores to films, most noteably “Cinema Paradiso” (for which he won the “Best Original Film Score” award from BAFTA in 1990), “Capturing the Friedmans,” and the forthcoming “Funny Money.” —SC
Ruth Crawford (later Ruth Crawford Seeger, after her marriage to Charles Seeger) was born in East Liverpool, Ohio in 1901. From the age of four, she lived in Jacksonville, Florida, where she received her early training as a pianist. In 1921 she moved to Chicago to enroll as a pianist in the American Conservatory of Music. However, her attention soon turned to composition. Most influential at the conservatory were Adolph Weidig, her major composition teacher, and Djane Lavoie-Herz, with whom she studied piano. On the advice of Henry Cowell, whom she met through Herz, Crawford left Chicago in 1929 to continue composition studies with Charles Seeger in New York. In 1930 she travelled to Germany, supported by the first Guggenheim Fellowship in composition ever awarded to a woman. There she composed her well-known String Quartet which, along with her Preludes, established her as a brilliant and inventive composer. Returning to New York in 1931, she married Seeger, with whom she had four children in the following ten years. (Pete Seeger is her stepson). Crawford completed most of her work as a composer between 1924 and 1936. She was a vital participant in the “ultra-modern” school of composition in New York City, a group of composers that included Henry Cowell, Dane Rudhyar, and Aaron Copland. Shortly after her marriage to Seeger and the birth of their first child, the family moved to Washington, D.C. She stopped composing and turned instead to the task of teaching music to children and of collecting, transcribing, arranging, and publishing American folk songs, projects she would continue until her untimely death from cancer at the age of fifty-two. The Nine Preludes were written between 1924 and 1928 while Crawford was studying with Djane Lavoie-Herz in Chicago. Judith Tick, author of the remarkable biography Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer’s Search for American Music, has noted that she shared Ms. Herz’s interests in “Theosophy, Eastern religious philosophy, 19th-century American Transcendentalism, and the imaginative tradition of Walt Whitman.” It was to Herz that Crawford dedicated, “with deep love and gratitude to Djane,” her nine preludes. Herz was also a leading proponent and interpreter of Scriabin, whose harmonic and metric influence echo through the preludes. (When Ruth Crawford brought them to her teacher Charles Seeger, he called them “derivative”). In 1927, Crawford wrote in her diary that Bach “and Scriabin are to me by far the greatest spirits born to music.” Compound meters, chromatic clusters, lyrical dissonance, and unusual pedal effects are hallmarks of these miniatures. Prelude No. 9, inspired by Lao Tse, is one of several Crawford works influenced by Taoist ideas. Henry Cowell published Preludes Nos. 6-9 in his New Music Editions. Preludes Nos. 1-5 remained unpublished until 1993. Although it took most of the twentieth century for Ruth Crawford Seeger to gain the recognition she deserves, composers across America have long acknowledged her inspiration. To celebrate Ruth Crawford Seeger’s centennial in 2001, I commissioned seven short pieces from composers whose work reminds me, in many different ways, of the young Ruth Crawford and her Preludes. The piano’s extraordinary capacity for resonance, the audible friction of a minor second, the inexhaustible possibilities of the piano’s middle (sostenuto) pedal, the drama of hearing the keyboard’s extreme ranges simultaneously, and the visceral powers of music are all elements which connect Ruth Crawford to these seven composers. —SC
Annea Lockwood’s title RCSC refers to the near palindrome formed by Ruth Crawford Seeger and Sarah Cahill’s names and the piece is dedicated to both, a composer I’ve long admired and a pianist whose dedication to American music enriches us. For its pitch content the piece draws on Crawford’s ten-note row from the final movement of her second string quartet. RCSC was written during a residency at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, California in September and October 2001; my thanks to DRAP for that support. —Annea Lockwood
Pauline Oliveros: Quintuplets Play Pen was written especially for Sarah Cahill after listening to her recording of pieces by Ruth Crawford. The piece was conceived mathematically using a 10 x 10 matrix of choices (- = half step or rest and + = whole step or play). The patterns derived remind me of Crawford’s music — both her early work and her work with folk music.—Pauline Oliveros
Maggi Payne:Holding Pattern — When Sarah Cahill approached me with the prospect of composing a work for piano in tribute to Ruth Crawford Seeger, particularly in reference to the Nine Preludes which Sarah had just recorded, I was intrigued. Ruth Crawford Seeger’s interest in timbre, particularly as represented in Prelude 6 and 9, spurred this brief work. This delicate timbral exploration’s last sustained notes are those that begin Prelude 6. The Mystico marking of Prelude 6 and the Tranquillo of Prelude 9 are reflected in the character of Holding Pattern. —Maggi Payne
Read about the March 4 concert. |
|||
| |