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Tuesday, September 27, 2005 8:00PM
Blue Star Contemporary Arts Center

Rain Tree Sketch II	Toru Takemitsu for solo piano
Sonata for Cello and Piano, Op.4	Zoltan Kodaly
Wings	Joan Tower for solo clarinet
Duo for Violin and Cello, Op.7	Zoltan Kodaly

COMPOSERS’ BIOGRAPHIES & PROGRAM NOTES

Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996) was hands down the most celebrated Japanese composer of his time. Besides a distinguished output of chamber, vocal, choral, electronic and orchestral works, Takemitsu scored around ninety Japanese films, including several for Akira Kurosawa. His fusion of Western music, especially the French music of Olivier Messiaen and Claude Debussy, with traditional Japanese music or, more precisely, Japanese culture and philosophy, creates wonderful works with open spaces and striking vistas. There is a pronounced Eastern attitude about Takemitsu's music, especially in how it deals with time. The best analogy seems to be the traditional Japanese garden, which Takemitsu often spoke of, where the view is always changing as focal points are obscured and then revealed and then obscured again as you wander through it, all by careful design.

Rain Tree Sketch (1982) and Rain Tree Sketch II (1992) were inspired by 1994 Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oé's series of short stories of the same name. In addition, Rain Tree Sketch II, which will be performed tonight, was written in memory of Messiaen, who had died earlier in 1992. These pieces are part of a collection of at least twelve works for different instrumental combinations which Takemitsu referred to as the Waterscape series. All of the Waterscape pieces have references to water in the titles and most were written between 1981-1987, although the first work in the series is from 1974 and the last is from 1993. All of these pieces use a motive made up of the letters S-E-A in their German note equivalents (E-flat, E, A, as "Es" in German is our E-flat), although sometimes these notes show up in transposition, and sometimes the motive appears in other works not part of the Waterscape series. It is probably no accident they also appear, although in reverse order, in Takemitsu's family name, in which they are the only three letters which are translatable to musical notes: tAkEmitSu. In addition, his work at this time also reflected a move toward a more Romantic sensibility, and he chose to explain his new harmonic language with the water metaphor "sea of tonality", a metaphor he, characteristically, never fully explained.

Both Zoltán Kodály's (1882-1967) Sonata for Cello and Piano, Op. 4 and the Duo for Violin and Cello, Op. 7 are early works, written during a time when his music was not always received well in Hungary. For example, when, in 1910, fellow composer Béla Bartók and Kodály organized a joint concert, which included the Sonata for Cello and Piano, they had to employ young string players (nearly all under 20) because the pieces were too modern for more established players. The Duo was performed in 1918 on an all-Kodály concert, where one critic  wrote that his music was "the eccentric, almost perverted, manifestation of a great and muscular, though misguided, talent," which has to be one of the great backhanded compliments of all time. At the time Kodály and Bartók, separated in age by only one year, were creating a new kind of Hungarian music. Now, of course, their works have become the very definition of Hungarian music, and their pioneering work in ethnomusicology, collecting and recording Hungarian folk-songs, helped preserve the soul of Hungarian music.

The Sonata is cast, oddly enough, in two movements (although originally it had three), a Fantasia and a sonata-form Allegro con spirito. The opening cello recitative-like melody reveals the influence of Hungarian folk music, while the opening piano chord, on the other hand, is clearly from Debussy, and this mix of French modernism and old Hungary is at the heart of this music. The second movement begins with a reference to Hungarian children's country songs, but Kodály claims Beethoven inspired the main theme, again pointing to the richness created by Kodály when he allowed folk music to mix freely with other, more traditional, influences. At the end of the second movement, Kodály allows the slow Fantasia to return, achieving a higher order of formal unity, one that also was probably inspired by Beethoven.

The Duo is also filled with folk influences. It is part of a group of four chamber works (including also the Sonata for Cello Solo, the Second String Quartet and the Trio Sonata) written between 1914 and 1920 in which Kodály achieved his mature personal style and his mastery of the intricacies of chamber music. In the violin and cello Kodály had two instruments which are much the same except for the registers they occupy, and so he treats the two instruments as equals, often playing up their registral differences. Like the Sonata, the Duo mixes Western forms (sonata form, trio and even suggestions of fugue) with folk music, namely dances and children's songs. And no wonder, as the piece was written following an expedition to collect folk songs in Transylvania.

Born in New Rochelle, New York in 1938, Joan Tower has become one of the most important and most performed American composers of her generations, and simply "one of the most successful woman composers of all time" (The New Yorker magazine). She grew up in South America, where her father was a mining engineer. Upon her return to the United States at age 18, she attended Bennington College and Columbia University, where she received a doctorate in composition. In 1969, Tower founded the Da Capo Chamber Players, which won the Naumburg Award for chamber music in 1973, and with whom she served as pianist for 15 years. Tower has received numerous honors, including the 1990 Grawemeyer Award, and her music has been performed throughout the world by orchestras, chamber ensembles, ballets, and major soloists. Currently she is composer-in-residence with the Orchestra of St. Luke's, a position she has held with a number of other orchestras and groups, and she is Asher Edelman Professor of Music at Bard College, where she has taught since 1972.

Joan Tower's Wings (1981) is the rare new music work that has entered the standard repertoire for many clarinetists (and saxophonist, as there is also a version for alto saxophone). The structure of the piece is simple, beginning from long, low, extremely soft notes, and gradually opening up, growing louder, more active and exploring the entire range of the instrument until the opening music returns at the end. The title refers to an image Tower had while writing the piece of a "large bird which sometimes glides almost motionlessly on the thermal currents and sometimes creates elaborate patterns, looping and diving at tremendous speeds." There are also hints of another inspiration for the piece, namely the solo clarinet movement from Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, which is titled, aptly, Abyss of the Birds.

- Program notes by David Heuser