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New Kids on the Block
The Sounds of the New Classical America
 

Tuesday, March 7, 2000 8:00PM
Ruth Taylor Concert Hall

Clapping Music (1972)

 Steve Reich (b. 1936)
for two performers
 

Physical Property (1993)
 

 Steven Mackey (b. 1956)
for string quartet & electric guitar
 
Press Release (1991) David Lang (b. 1957)
for bass clarinet solo
 

— Intermission —
 

String Quartet No. 2
“Company” (1983)
I
II
III
IV
 

 Philip Glass (b. 1937)
Like a … an Engine (1994) Joan Tower (b. 1938)
for piano solo
 
Cycles & Myths‡ (1996) Timothy Kramer (b. 1959)
for violin, clarinet, cello & piano
 


 

COMPOSERS’ BIOGRAPHIES & PROGRAM NOTES

Steve Reich has been recognized internationally as one of the world’s foremost living composers. From his early taped speech works It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966) to The Cave (1993) his collaboration with the video artist Beryl Korot, 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. Mr. Reich’s work has been hailed by the Washington Post as “absolutely spellbinding ... so original in impulse and form that it challenges all past assumptions about the goals of the art … intensely visceral and frequently almost hallucinogenic in impact.”

Born in New York and raised there and in California, Mr. Reich graduated with honors in Philosophy from Cornell University in 1957. For the next two years, he studied composition with Hall Overton, and from 1958 to 1961 he studied at the Juilliard School of Music with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti. Mr. Reich received his M.A. in Music from Mills College in 1963, where he worked with Darius Milhaud and Luciano Berio.

During the summer of 1970, with the help of a grant from the Institute for International Education, Mr. Reich studied drumming at the Institute for African Studies at the University of Ghana in Accra. In 1973 and 1974 he studied Balinese Semar Pegulingan and Gamelan Gambang at the American Society for Eastern Arts in Seattle and Berkeley, California. From 1976 to 1977 he studied 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 eighteen members or more.

Mr. Reich’s 1988 piece, Different Trains, marked a new compositional method, rooted in It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out, in which speech recordings generate the musical material for musical instruments. The New York Times hailed Different Trains as “a work of such astonishing originality that breakthrough seems the only possible description … possesses an absolutely harrowing emotional impact.” In 1990 he received a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Composition for Different Trains as recorded by the Kronos Quartet on Nonesuch, his exclusive recording agent.

Mr. Reich’s most recent major concert works, City Life and Proverb, have met with widespread acclaim. City Life, which features such sampled sounds of the city as car horns, door slams, air brakes, subway chimes, pile drivers, car alarms, heart beats, boat horns, buoys, and fire and police sirens, was commissioned by the Ensemble Modern, the London Sinfonietta, and the Ensemble InterContemporain. Reich is currently composing Three Tales, a full-evening music-theater piece on the topic of technology and its consequences. The first act, Hindenburg, premiered at the Spoleto USA Festival 1998. The other two parts of the trilogy, Bikini and Dolly, examine atomic bomb testing and the cloning of an adult sheep respectively, and will premiere as part of the completed Three Tales in 2001.

“Starting in 1971 my ensemble began touring Europe. We would carry 2000 pounds of loudspeakers, amplifiers, drums, marimbas, glockenspiels, electric organs, microphones, etc. In 1972 I composed Clapping Music to create a piece of music that would need no instruments beyond the human body. At first I thought it would be a phase piece, but this proved inappropriate since it introduced a difficulty (phasing) that seemed inconsistent with such a simple way of producing sound. The solution was to have one part remain fixed, repeating the pattern throughout, while the second moves abruptly, after a number of repeats, from unison to one beat ahead, and so on, until it is back in unison with the first. It can thus be difficult to hear that the second performer is in fact always playing the same pattern as the first, though starting in a different place.”      — Steve Reich

Steven Mackey has established himself as one of the most gifted and original American composers to emerge at the end of the 20™ century. Born in Frankfurt, Germany, to American parents, he was raised and educated in the U.S. His early training in performance was as a classical and electric guitarist and Baroque lutenist. In 1977 he toured Europe as a lutenist under the auspices of the University of California; he graduated summa cum laude from that institution. His studies culminated in a Ph.D. in composition from Brandeis University. Mackey has been a Professor of Music at Princeton University since 1985.

Mackey’s idiom, a multi-layered sort of rhythm and sonority, draws its expanded harmonic palette from western art music, its wit and vivacity from the imaginative transformation of popular music elements. His chamber music often features retuned instruments and microtones.

Steven Mackey is the recipient of numerous awards, including Guggenheim, Lieberson, and Tanglewood fellowships. He has twice won Kennedy Center Friedheim Awards, for his scores Fumeux Fume (1987) and Physical Property (1993). He has received numerous commissions from ensembles and soloists around the world, including the Kronos String Quartet. The product of their commission was a trilogy of works for electric guitar and string quartet; On the Verge, Troubadour Songs, and Physical Property.

“Between the ages of eighteen and twenty, I was a professional freestyle skier. My vision of perfection was to careen down the mountain, head over heels, arms and legs flailing, on-lookers gasping and somehow end up at the bottom with a smile on my face and not a snowflake on me. This aesthetic finds its musical analog more in Physical Property than in any of my other works. As the title suggests, this piece is about the physicality of performing fast-paced, action-packed chamber music. Physical Property pits the crunchy sound and rhythmic drive of the electric guitar against intricate virtuoso fiddling.”     — Steven Mackey

“There is no name yet for this kind of music” writes Mark Swed about David Lang, the provocative American composer. Co-founder of New York’s legendary festival, Bang on a Can, Lang is one of the most interesting in today’s crop of young Americans. His distinct sound fuses the tradition of classical music whit urban aggressiveness, where melodies are accompanied by noise and subtle harmonies are pulled apart by pounding rhythms.

Commissioned by such organizations as the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the BBC Singers, and the Santa Fe Opera, Lang’s works are showing up with regularity around the world – at the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic; at the Tanglewood and Aspen Music Festivals, the Holland, Berlin and Huddersfield festivals, the Munich Biennale, and at Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center and the South Bank Centre.

His awards include the Rome Prize, the BMW Music-Theater Prize (Munich), a Kennedy Center/Friedham Award, the Revson Fellowship with the New York Philharmonic, and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Born in Los Angeles, Lang holds degrees from Stanford University and the University of Iowa, receiving his doctorate from the Yale School of Music in 1989. He has studied with Jacob Druckman, Hans Werner and Martin Bresnick.

“I wrote Press Release in 1991 for bass clarinetist Evan Ziporyn. When you compose for one person, you can’t get all the colors that you’d have with an ensemble or orchestra, so you have to imagine some sort of interesting problem. I wanted to do something that was really rhythmic. The original idea behind this piece was that of a high melody alternating with a low bass line, so that you get a high pop and a low pop switching back and forth as fast as possible, and these two worlds coexist. I wanted the upper melody to be recognizable and the bottom bass line to be recognizable, to be a real bass line, a driving funk thing. In classical music, the bass is only there to support the melody, which is where the action is. But the bass line is the place where funk music really shines. Who has the best bass lines in the business? I am a big James Brown fan and I thought, if you want a bass line, you got to go to James. So I made the key changes sound like James Brown. Because of the way the bass clarinet works, I thought you’d have to press the keys down to make all the low notes, and you’d release the keys to make the high notes … press … release. I was really proud of myself because I thought I had made this funny joke, and then, of course, Evan said, ’You know, a lot of those high notes you play with all of your fingers down, and a lot of those low notes you play with all your fingers up.’ But I didn’t think it was worth it to change the title.”      —David Lang

Born in Baltimore in 1937, Philip Glass discovered music in his father’s radio repair shop. In addition to servicing radios, Ben Glass carried a line of records and, when certain ones sold poorly, he would take them home and play them for his three children, trying to discover why they didn’t appeal to his customers. These happened to be recordings of great chamber works, and the future composer rapidly became familiar with Beethoven quartets, Schubert sonatas, Shostakovich symphonies and other music then considered “offbeat.” It was not until he was in his upper teens that he began to encounter more “standard” classics.

Glass began the violin at six and became serious about music with the flute at eight. But by the time he was 15, he had become frustrated with the limited flute repertoire as well as with musical life in post-war Baltimore. During his second year in high school, he applied for admission to the University of Chicago, passed, and with his parents’ encouragement, moved to Chicago where he supported himself with part-time jobs waiting tables and loading airplanes at airports. He majored in mathematics and philosophy, and in off hours practiced piano and concentrated on such composers as Ives and Webern.

By the time he was 23, Glass had studied with Vincent Persichetti, Darius Milhaud and William Bergsma at the Juilliard School in New York. After a brief period studying the music of Aaron Copland and William Schuman, he rejected their styles and then serialism and was beginning to connect with the sounds of such maverick composers as Harry Partch, Ives, Moondog, Henry Cowell, and Virgil Thomson. But he had still not found his own voice. Still searching, he moved to Paris and two years of intensive study under Nadia Boulanger.

In Paris, he was hired by a filmmaker to transcribe the Indian music of Ravi Shankar in notation readable to French musicians. In the process, he discovered the techniques of Indian music. Glass promptly renounced his previous music. After researching music in North Africa, India, and the Himalayas, he returned to New York and began applying Eastern techniques to his own work.

Although Glass’s output ranges from opera and symphony orchestra to film scores and documentary, for chorus, dance, and theatre pieces, it is his string quartets that some consider may contain some of his most intimate music. It is the music to which he turned at moments of profound introspection about self and music. String Quartet No. 2 (Company) was originally written to accompany a 1984 staged dramatization of Samuel Beckett’s prose poem, Company, by Mabou Mines, the theater company with which Glass had long been associated. Company is a soliloquy in which a man, presumably at the end of his life, hears a voice of his past and comes to terms with a profound solitude.

Joan Tower is one of this generation’s most dynamic and colorful composers. Her bold and energetic music, with its striking imagery and novel structural forms, has drawn large, enthusiastic audiences. Her first orchestral work, Sequoia, quickly entered the repertoire, with performances by orchestras including Saint Louis, New York, San Francisco, Minnesota, Tokyo NHK, Toronto, and the National Symphony and London Philharmonia.

From 1969 to 1984, Tower was active as founder and pianist with the 1973 Naumberg Award-winning ensemble the Da Capo Players. They commissioned and premiered many of her most popular works, including Platinum Spirals, Hexachords, Wings, Petroushskates, and Amazon I. Also active as a conductor, Tower has conducted at the White House, the Scotia Festival in Canada, and the American Symphony Orchestra. Tower is currently Composer-in-Residence with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. She is also the recipient of the Delaware Symphony’s 1998 Alfred I. Dupont Award for Distinguished American Composers and Conductors, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is currently Asher Edelman Professor of Music at Bard College where she has taught since 1972. Or like a … an engine was composed in 1994 in response to a commission from WNYC Radio to write a short work inspired by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet John Ashbery. The title is taken from a line in Ashbery’s poem No Longer Very Clear. The relentless, motor-driven piece was premiered by Ursula Oppens.

Timothy Kramer’s works have been performed throughout the United States, Europe, and Mexico, with performances by the Indianapolis and Detroit Symphony Orchestras, the Winters Chamber Orchestra, the Tacoma Symphony, North/South Consonance, SOLI Chamber Ensemble, the ONIX Ensemble (Mexico), and the Detroit Chamber Winds. He has also been a featured composer at the San Antonio International Piano Competition, the Mostly Women Composers’ Festival, and at national conferences of the American Guild of Organists, the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States, and the College Music Society.

His honors include grants and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, Meet the Composer, BMI, ASCAP, the American Guild of Organists, the University of Michigan, Indiana State University, the American Music Center, and the Clear Lake Symphony (Houston). His graduate degrees are from the University of Michigan, where he studied with William Albright, Leslie Bassett, William Bolcom, and George Wilson. He also studied with composer Martin Redel as a Fulbright Scholar to Germany in 1988-89. He has taught at the University of Michigan, Indiana State University, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, and is currently Associate Professor at Trinity University in San Antonio.

His commissions include orchestral, choral, chamber, and solo works and he is published by Southern Music, Hinshaw Music, Earnestly Music, and Selah Publications. Recent recordings include his Etude Fantasy (on a theme for Madame Duruflé) (organ, 1995) on Calcante by organist David Heller and his Colors from a Changing Sky (piano, 1994) on North/South Records by pianist Max Lifchitz. His new piano works, True Tango (1998) and Firmament Etudes (1997) will be soon released on CD by SOLI pianist Carolyn True. His recent work for wind band, Mosaics, was written for the Midwest Band and Orchestra Clinic and premiered last December. He is currently completing a large orchestral piece for the San Antonio, Austin Civic, and Tacoma Symphony Orchestras for premieres in Spring 2000.

Cycles and Myths was commissioned by SOLI Chamber Ensemble and premiered in San Antonio in March of 1996. This piece presents a number of cyclic ideas which occur with literal and varied repetition. Connections are made between the individual players of the ensemble through similarities of timbre and gesture. In every “cycle,” a driving, rhythmic theme coordinates all the motives assigned to each player. The “myths,” which occur between cycles, are essentially character variations, where each soloist stakes their own musical territory and presents material specifically assigned to their instrument. In this way, connections are made between repetition (cycles) and development (myths), between recognition and contrast. This work also contains many references—both through quotation and imitation— to works with this specific instrumentation (e.g., Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time) and to works by Schoenberg and Bach. Through these references, distinct musical styles are heard against the backdrop of cycles of similarity.


 


 

GUEST BIOGRAPHIES

Born in Rochester, New York, Karen Stiles began studying the violin at age 5. She received a Bachelor of Music degree from Oberlin College where she studied with Stephen Clapp and Gregory Fulkerson. She went on to pursue a Master of Music degree from Indiana University and New England Conservatory where she studied with James Buswell and baroque violin with Stanley Ritchie. As a member of the New American Chamber Orchestra, an eleven member string ensemble, she toured throughout Europe and Scandinavia. She performed at many of the major European music festivals including the Korshon Music Festival in Vassa, Finland and the Uppsala Festival. Karen then became the Assistant Principal Second Violin of the San Antonio Symphony. She has appeared as soloist with the Knoxville Chamber Orchestra and the San Antonio Symphony. Karen was a founding member of the Sierra Grande String Quartet and the Sierra Grande Chamber Music Festival in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. She also performs with various other chamber ensembles and is an active teacher an coach for the Youth Orchestras of San Antonio.

Jeannine (Dee Dee) Fancher, is a native of Chicago. Prior to her eight years with the San Antonio Symphony, she was Assistant Principal Viola with the Jacksonville Symphony for four years. Ms. Fancher has no formal college or conservatory training but was a student of Roland Vamos at Western Illinois University. During the 1998-1999 concert season she performed as a soloist with the Winters Chamber Orchestra and annually plays with the Glimmerglass Opera Festival near Oneonta, New York.

Former student of famed Indian Sarod maestro Ustad Ali Akbar Khan and dropout of St. Phillips Community College, Bobdog Catlin (born Robert Lawrence) has been doing weird things to electric guitars since 1978. He has recently appeared on albums and CD’s by Psychic T.V. (New York), Test Dept. (England), and Amoeba (San Francisco), among others and has recorded and toured extensively, playing electric guitar and sitar with industrial supergroup Pigface (Chicago). Mr. Dog’s most recent endeavor is a conglomeration of artists and musicians playing a blend of psychedelic world ambient sound sculpting called Pseudo Buddha, which has recently released a CD entitled Motive on Uncle Buzz Records.

Despite his lack of any academic accreditation, he has given lectures on his musical views at the University of the Incarnate Word, Trinity University, and San Antonio College. In addition to playing music and building bizarre hybrid electric stringed instruments, Bobdog is also the chief engineer and sound mangler at the Doghouse Audio Laboratory, specializing in recording classical ensembles in a live setting, as well as creating wonderfully strange sounds that titillate and hypnotize.

Join SOLI for the Grand Finale of the Season concert, Tuesday, May 16

BACK TO SCHOOL
The Second Viennese School Revisited

Variations for piano
Slow movement for string quartet
Anton Webern

Adagio for violin, clarinet & piano
Alban Berg

Pierrot lunaire
Arnold Schoenber

with special guests Karen Stiles, Rita Porfiris, Linda McNeil and Martha Fabrique


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