Program Notes

The opening concert of Boston Modern Orchestra Project's 2006-07 season, the orchestra's tenth, features the work of four American composers, including two works by BMOP's new composer-in-residence, Lisa Bielawa, who is vocal soloist in her own unfinish'd, sent, whose title is from Shakespeare's Richard III. Also from Shakespeare is Jacob Druckman's title Nor Spell Nor Charm; that piece and Druckman's Quickening Pulse are on this program. Charles Fussell is a familiar name to Boston concertgoers; the former Boston University faculty member's music has been performed frequently here (not to mention elsewhere), and BMOP performed his Wilde Symphony in 2004. BMOP has also performed Derek Bermel's music before, playing his Voices concerto for clarinet and orchestra for the national conference of the American Symphony Orchestra League in 2000, when the conference was held in Boston.

CHARLES FUSSELL (b. 1938)
High Bridge, Portrait of Hart Crane, Prelude for Orchestra

Charles Fussell was an important figure in the musical life of Boston for twenty years, as a faculty member of Boston University beginning in the mid-1980s, artistic director of the contemporary music festival New Music Harvest, co-founder and director of the New England Composers Orchestra, and in many other capacities. His music has been and is still programmed frequently by Boston ensembles, in particular Collage New Music, among others. Currently he is on the composition faculty at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where he has taught for several years, and is active as Vice President of the Virgil Thomson Foundation. Fussell attended the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where he worked with Bernard Rogers, and studied at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, working with Boris Blacher. While in Germany he also attended the Bayreuth masterclasses of Fridelind Wagner. He later was assistant to and a close friend of the composer Virgil Thomson. He received a citation and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, grants from the Ford and Copland foundations, a Fulbright, and other recognitions.

In addition to five symphonies and many other instrumental pieces, Fussell's catalog includes several large vocal works, including the chamber opera The Astronaut's Tale, a recording of which was released on Albany Records; Specimen Days, based on poetry of Walt Whitman, and the aforementioned Wilde: A Symphony in Three Movements. The latter was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1991. His most recent large-scale work was a Gurrelieder-like cycle High Bridge, for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, based on the American poet Hart Crane's epic The Bridge. Fussell recently completed a sixth and final movement to this 2003 work. Another project in the planning stages is a collaboration with his longtime librettist Will Graham on a comic murder mystery opera set in the western New York locale of Lily Dale, a community established in the nineteenth century and dedicated to the religion of spiritualism, and among whose residents are a large number of mediums and healers. The Boston Modern Orchestra project is recording several of his works for future CD release.

Fussell's High Bridge Prelude is a standalone orchestral prelude that also serves as the third-movement interlude to the large cycle High Bridge. That piece was commissioned by the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, which gave the premiere of the original, five-movement piece in October 2003. Fussell had begun the Prelude as a way of "writing a way into" the larger work, exploring its atmosphere, themes, and musical materials. The completed High Bridge Prelude was premiered by itself on a March 2003 concert of the Boston University Symphony Orchestra led by David Hoose.

While the vocal settings of High Bridge thread together narratives and characters found in Hart Crane's big poem, the High Bridge Prelude is meant to encapsulate the story of the poet's life - the aggressive fanfare-like music reflecting Crane's sometimes violent exuberance, the percussion near the end representing dead-drums, marking the poet's eventual suicide and the severing of his life's potential. Charles Fussell has recently altered the original ending of the Prelude, which had stood to usher in the fourth movement of the larger cycle, to make a more effective ending for the independent concert work. This is the first performance of the new ending.

LISA BIELAWA (b. 1968)
unfinish'd, sent
Roam

 Tonight BMOP introduces to its audience the music of Lisa Bielawa (b.1968), who begins a three-year tenure as BMOP's composer-in-residence this season. Bielawa grew up in a family of musicians. Her father is a well-known San Francisco composer, her mother an early music keyboardist and scholar. Her brother is also a composer and singer-songwriter. Bielawa began violin and piano lessons at an early age; by college music was a second language. When she started her college career at Yale, she opted for a degree in another strong interest, literature. The music department was more relaxed than the literature department about non-majors taking advanced courses.

Through her years as a professional musician, Bielawa never made a deliberate decision to "become" a composer; that facet of her activities gradually, even irregularly, supplanted that of her performing life only relatively recently, beginning in about 2000, which is to say about the year of one of the works on this concert, unfinish'd, sent. After college she took a position first as a substitute, then a permanent member of the Philip Glass Ensemble as a vocalist, a relationship that she has continued to maintain for the past fifteen years. (She will tour with the group again next year.) At the same time, she has also performed in other capacities, including in sets of her own cabaret-style songs, for which she wrote both text and music. Although she had begun writing music at about age 6, and as an adult received numerous commissions, she had little dedicated, formal training as a composer - her most fruitful study came in just a few weeks with the British composer Brian Ferneyhough. Even then, however, it was Ferneyhough's wide-ranging cultural curiosity that appealed most to Bielawa. In spite of not considering herself a composer exclusively, Bielawa has had numerous notable successes with her own works, receiving awards and grants from such organizations as the New York State Council on the Arts, ASCAP, and others. She is also artistic director of the annual MATA (Music at the Anthology) Festival, of which Philip Glass is the executive producer. Her current compositional projects include a Creative Capital Foundation grant for the soprano Susan Narucki for a work to be performed in public spaces. For her BMOP residency, Bielawa is working on a double concerto for two violins and orchestra as well as a large piece in the concerto for orchestra genre. Along the way, as part of getting to know the ensemble, she will also write smaller-scale solo and chamber works for individual BMOP performers.

Bielawa's music is notably colorful and sonically detailed, with instrumental gestures taking on an almost tactile quality. As a performer herself, she is constantly aware of needing not only to write idiomatically for each instrument but to make each part satisfying, even fun, to play. This results in a chamber-music intricacy even in large ensemble works, and an orchestral imagination not far distant from the consummate colorist Jacob Druckman. Both unfinish'd, sent - which, as already mentioned, takes its title and text from Shakespeare - and Roam were triggered, like many of Bielawa's works, by her great enthusiasm for literature. She is a voracious reader; in many of her works, composing is an extended act of reading, a translation of her joy in this rather solitary pastime into the social, public acts of performing, and listening to, music. This translation doesn't involve a programmatic depiction of narrative elements of a story but rather Bielawa's emotional and artistic reactions to a text, which only rarely cues on specific scene or action. In a work with text such as unfinish'd, sent, the words themselves are treated as a medium for the voice, a reversal of the normal order of things; the newly created musical meaning overwhelms the constraints of the textual fragment. This meaning, then, expands back into its context within Richard III and forward into Bielawa's new context.

In Roam, a similar experience, necessarily abetted by the composer's comments on the piece (see below), translates only a small part of the composer's immersion in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, only here the experience lacks the specifics afforded (or insisted upon) by a text. Common to both works is an approach to large-scale form that embraces the unexpected, such as the disproportionately long instrumental passage of unfinish'd, sent prior to the soprano's entrance. This type of form reflects Bielawa's awareness of, and fondness for, results (in life situations as well as in art) that are unpredictable but nonetheless valid and real.

unfinish'd, sent was premiered in May 2000 by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, Derek Bermel, conductor and Lisa Bielawa, soprano. Roam was premiered February 5, 2003, in Jordan Hall by the New England Conservatory Philharmonia conducted by Dante Anzolini. Lisa Bielawa's own notes on her pieces are printed below.

I roam above the sea,
I wait for the right weather,
I beckon to the sails of ships.
Under the cope of storms, with waves disputing,
On the free crossway of the sea
When shall I start on my free course?
- Aleksandr Pushkin, Eugene Onegin (tr. Vladimir Nabokov)

"Roam began while I was reading Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, which has passages of great intimacy and vulnerability, sections where the storyteller addresses the reader directly and hints at sorrows of his own, before going back to the story at hand. One of these passages (see epigraph) struck a powerful chord in me. In this passage the narrator unaccountably leaves his protagonist, as if interrupted by his own memory, to muse on his own experience as an exile. We don't know who this narrator is, or why his personal history contains such sorrows, but he occasionally gives us a window into his own humanity, and these are moments of disarming and unexpected intimacy. This passage gave rise to four separate pieces, each bearing the title of one of the active verbs - Roam, Wait, Beckon, and Start. Together these four pieces form the half-concert-length work The Right Weather.

There is such beauty and even strength in the part of us that stubbornly will not move on. When I read this Pushkin excerpt, which I see as a meditation on the narrator's own internal exile, I felt I had found a whole emotional world that could guide me through an extended musical journey. This journey begins with the restless sound world of Roam. I was aware of a roiling impatience underlying a deceptively calm, passive scene: the view from a remote cliff, overlooking an unpropitious sea.

…unfinish'd, sent before my time into this breathing world…
- Shakespeare, Richard III

"Commissioned by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, this piece was subsequently performed at the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan, under the baton of Aaron Jay Kernis, and on the MATA Festival in New York by the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, conducted by Lorraine Vaillancourt. I was the soloist for all of these performances, and the piece was written expressly as an opportunity to collaborate directly with ensembles in this way, as both performer and composer.

The opening soliloquy of Shakespeare's Richard III presents a man who finds that the cruelty of wartime suits him, because of the cruelty of his own birth, which resulted in deformity. For the text of this piece I took a single phrase from this painfully vivid, forty-line account of his unfitness for delight or pleasure: "…unfinish'd, sent before my time into this breathing world…." Here the connection is made between his extreme vulnerability as a child and its cruel consequences in his spirit. I was moved by the universal applicability of this image - an ugly and cruel self, resulting from deep insecurities. This monologue opens with the famous line, "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer…." Although I didn't use these words in the piece, they triggered memories of the particular and complex significance of Vivaldi's Winter in my own childhood. Traces of the Vivaldi, heard through difficult memories, inhabit the piece." - Lisa Bielawa

JACOB DRUCKMAN (1928-1996)
Nor Spell Nor Charm
Quickening Pulse

Jacob Druckman, like Derek Bermel and Lisa Bielawa, had ties to Yale, although not as a student but as chair of the composition department and director of the electronic music studio. He had come to music by a practical and hands-on route, first working in a puppet theater, then quitting high school to play jazz trumpet for a living. He also played violin in orchestras, and it was with his violin teacher, Louis Gessensway, that he first studied composition. He was fairly far along in his musical career before beginning really intensive compositional training at the Berkshire (now Tanglewood) Music Center with Aaron Copland and, finally at age twenty-one, enrolling at the Juilliard School, where he eventually earned his master's degree. He studied with Persichetti, Mennin, and Wagenaar, all known for their classical, somewhat conservative proclivities and excellent compositional technique.

Through a Fulbright to Paris during his Juilliard years, Druckman made many long-term friends in Europe and an awareness of the emerging avant-garde on both sides of the Atlantic. Having begun teaching at Juilliard in 1956, he embarked on his compositional career by embracing the potential of the theatrical in performance - taking his cues from composers like Cage and Berio - as well as the expanding possibilities of electronic music. He explored this new aspect of music working in the Columbia-Princeton electronic music studio - Mecca for the progressive American composer in the 1960s - where he refined a sense of timbre already highly developed from his practical experiences as a performer. Among the most important products of these investigations were Druckman's Animus pieces, a series of works for live performers and pre-recorded tape. Another significant piece was his String Quartet No. 2, in which Druckman reconciled a complex and rigorous twelve-tone-based formal scheme with a highly individualized, highly effective expressive content.
Druckman's interest in instrumental timbre led him inevitably to the orchestra, and in 1972 he made his big splash in the medium with the extraordinary Windows, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Its visually evocative title reflects (or sheds light on) Druckman's both coloristic and architectural conceit, expanded upon in such equally visual titles as Chiaroscuro, Prism, and Mirage, all from the same decade. His approach to musical expression became increasingly inclusive in later years, embracing direct quotation as well as aspects of tonal music of the past, which the composer had mostly avoided in the first part of his mature career. The big project of the last decade of his life was an opera based on the Medea myth, but this bore fruit only in a couple of performable fragments or sketches. His Viola Concerto (1978) is an important addition to the literature for that instrument. He wrote a piano concerto near the end of his life, and other large works include Demos, Shog, Summer Lightning, and the three-movement Brangle, of which the independently conceived Quickening Pulse for large orchestra, written earlier, is the finale.

Quickening Pulse (a.k.a. That Quickening Pulse), according to Druckman, "is an imagined feminine dance of acceleration." Predictably, pulse and sub-pulse, extremely fast and articulated throughout the orchestra in ebb and flow of texture, is primary. Druckman maintains the sense of driving forward by pushing and releasing the basic tempo and shifting the metrical groupings from a basic measure of 6/8 to 7/8, 8/8, 4/4, or 9/8. Thus intensity increases, without the change being predictable, through the seven minutes or so of its duration. Quickening Pulse was commissioned by Chase Manhattan Bank, N.A., for the New York International Festival of the Arts and was premiered by the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Slatkin conducting, on July 9, 1988, at Avery Fisher Hall in Manhattan.

About Nor Spell Nor Charm, the composer wrote:

"The title 'Nor Spell Nor Charm' is a quotation from the text of a song I wrote in March 1989 for my dear friend and colleague, Jan DeGaetani, the great American mezzo-soprano. She was failing of leukemia at that time and never had a chance to perform it. When I began to write the present work, not only was she on my mind but also the music of the little song, which I felt was very strong and special. The new work is an extension and elaboration of that song and is dedicated to the memory of Jan DeGaetani. The text is from William Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream:

You spotted snakes with double tongue,
Thorny hedge-hogs, be not seen;
Newts, and blind worms, do no wrong;
Come not near our fairy queen.
Philomel, with melody
Sing in our sweet lullaby;
Lulla, lulla, lullaby,
lulla, lulla, lullaby:
Never harm
Nor spell, nor charm
Come our lovely lady nigh;
So, good night, with lullaby.

"Nor Spell Nor Charm was commissioned by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Orpheus, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts." - Jacob Druckman

Pride of premiere for Nor Spell Nor Charm went to the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, who first performed it under the composer's direction on March 2, 1990, at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles. This is a beautiful chamber-orchestra work of about fifteen minutes' duration, contrasting in its essential lyricism with Quickening Pulse but sharing with that piece Druckman's unsurpassed, unique orchestral imagination. The frequent brief solo gestures and passages - for bass or standard clarinet, or alto flute, or keyboard - seem to illustrate within the environment of Shakespeare's play the particular creatures addressed by Titania's attendant fairies in the above quote. The big shape of the piece is fast-slow-fast, a shimmering beginning giving way to a darker, mysterious, and somewhat rhythmically static middle, followed by an almost jazzy passage that disperses into the charmed air.

DEREK BERMEL (b. 1967)
Thracian Echoes

In many ways Derek Bermel's career epitomizes the - admittedly fluid and multifaceted - model of the contemporary concert music composer, with his polyglot experience in jazz, rock, "classical," and "world music" styles, and his range of activities not only as composer but as performer and practical ethnomusicologist. There are enough points of contact between Bermel's career and Lisa Bielawa's to be able to remark upon the multicultural, multidisciplinary, and performance-rooted approach that they both seem to share, and in fact the two are close colleagues, and have been involved in each other's musical projects.

The recipient of a Rome Prize, several ASCAP awards, and Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships, Derek Bermel has a fairly gaudy track record, but these accolades were earned from his years of continuous hard work in the trenches. Bermel attended Yale University and the University of Michigan, and studied composition with William Albright, Louis Andriessen, William Bolcom, and Michael Trenzer. He studied ethnomusicology and orchestration in Jerusalem with Andre Hajdu. Far from being a strict academic, Bermel has also traveled to study Lobi xylophone in Ghana, Thracian folk music in Bulgaria, and uillean pipes in Ireland. He is active as an advocate of new music, conducting and performing works of his colleagues as well as his own music; he is also involved in the band Peace by Piece as keyboardist, songwriter, and vocalist. He co-founded the ensemble Music from Copland House as well as the pan-Atlantic crossover TONK Ensemble. As an educator he founded the Making Score program of the New York Youth Symphony and has taught masterclasses and served residencies throughout the U.S.

As a composer, Bermel has been commissioned by such ensembles as the American Composers Orchestra, Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, eighth blackbird, and the Albany Symphony, and by the Fromm Foundation, the Gilmore Festival, and the Fabermusic Millennium Series. His works have been performed throughout the U.S. and frequently in Europe by ensembles including the Saint Louis, New Jersey, and National symphonies, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, among many others. He is currently serving a three-year tenure as composer-in-residence with the American Composers Orchestra. This past spring the Philharmonia of London played an all-Bermel concert as part of its Music Today series, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project is scheduled to release a disc of his music next year. Current projects include a musical, Loving Family, with librettist Wendy S. Walters, and a Duo Consortium commission for a concerto for flute, clarinet, and orchestra. This month, on November 16, 17, and 18, the American Composers Orchestra and Jazz at Lincoln Center with Wynton Marsalis present a newly commissioned work, Bermel's The Migration Series, based on paintings by Jacob Lawrence, in a concert with Gerwshin's Rhapsody in Blue and other works.

Derek Bermel's compositional style shows a strong eclectic streak, and his music revels in a performance-based energy akin to that of jazz, rock, and the Eastern European improvisation-based folk music that is a key to many of his works. This is very much a performer's music, and must be great fun to play. What Bermel realizes is that fully notated music is but a starting point for what players will bring to a performance, and that whatever style of his own his scores contain is enriched by the players' sensibilities, even as the outlines of his own compositional personality begin to blur.

Thracian Echoes is one of the direct compositional products of Bermel's study in Bulgaria, where Bermel was faced with disparities between what it was possible to notate and various of levels of awareness (what is heard, what is "felt") among players and listeners. The composer writes:

"In August 2001, I traveled to Plovdiv, Bulgaria, to study the Thracian folk style with clarinetist Nikola Iliev. Thracia is a region in Bulgaria which stretches over the Rodopi mountains and extends into modern Greece. I spent several hours each day transcribing and memorizing the songs…. After leaving Plovdiv, I spent several days in Sofia, where I visited Gyorgy Petkov, arranger and composer for the Angelite Women's Choir. I spent several days looking over his arrangements and discussing counterpoint and harmonic progression in Bulgarian vocal music.

Several months later, in Rome, I began to sketch Thracian Echoes, which I hoped would somehow fuse the mournful with the manic aspects of the Bulgarian spirit, melding the tight, soulful harmonies of the choral songs with the infectious rhythmic energy of the instrumental music. The melodies appeared to contain echoes within the phrases themselves, as though a certain nostalgia were present even in their first iterations; this hypnotic quality served as a starting point for the piece. Throughout the work, the songs return in various manifestations: harmonic, contrapuntal, melodic, coloristic. I composed my own slower "choir" songs and rewrote phrases from several faster instrumental songs - Payduchko Xhoro (5/8), Mizhka Richenitza (7/8), Daychovo Xhoro (9/8), and Krivo Pazardzhishko Xhoro (11/16) - placing them in different modes. The piece springs from the opening gesture, a glissed, ascending whole tone. Melodies are transformed into one another and reappear in various modal incarnations, often placed in counterpoint or rhythmic canon in two, three, four, and five voices." - Derek Bermel

In Thracian Echoes, players in the various instrumental sections are faced with the contradictory prospect of maintaining cohesion as a section while playing approximately indicated gestures, such as the opening glissando, short trills, and the like, also keeping in mind the necessity of achieving an expressive performance of more clearly notated events. This give-and-take is amplified in the large scale by Bermel's interpolation of cadenza passages and stretches of flexible tempos. The idealized result creates a hybrid of the intricate control of Western notational practices with the no less sophisticated, continually malleable passion of improvised folk music.

Copyright 2005 Robert Kirzinger. Robet Kirzinger is an active composer who writes frequently for the Boston Symphony Orchestra program book and is editor of the program book for the annual Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music.