Program Notes

PROGRAM NOTES

The third Boston Modern Orchestra Project concert of the orchestra's tenth season is an all-French program featuring the world premiere of a BMOP commission, Betsy Jolas's Jour B (B Day), which serves as a birthday present for both the orchestra and the work's composer herself, who celebrated her eightieth birthday just after completing the piece. Also on the program are works by composers of two later generations, Pascal Dusapin (b.1955) and Bruno Mantovani (b.1974), both of whose styles bear the experience of the music of Jolas and her contemporaries.

BETSY JOLAS (b. 1926)
Jour B (B Day)

Betsy Jolas grew up in a culturally vibrant household were her parents were both well-known intellectuals. Although she was born in Paris, both of her parents were born in the United States. Her father, Eugène Jolas (1894-1952), was French, born in New Jersey but raised in Lorraine, France. Her mother was Maria Jolas, née McDonald (1893-1987), from a notable family of Louisville, Kentucky. She had trained to become a classical singer. The two joined forces to found and edit the literary magazine transition, perhaps the most important of its day, in the year after Betsy's birth. transition published works of such writers as Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Beckett, Joyce, and W.C. Williams as well as pieces by Eugène and translations by Maria, and was the first publisher of the whole of Joyce's Finnegans Wake under the title "work in progress." With many of its contributors forming the circle of the family acquaintance, the young Betsy was immersed in artistic and intellectual environment from an early age.

The family moved to the United States in 1940 with the onset of World War II, and Jolas continued to come into contact with many important artistic minds in New York City as a teenager. She attended Bennington College in Vermont, and on her return to France in 1946 continued her studies at the Paris Conservatoire with Milhaud and Messiaen. She also came into contact with the music of her musical contemporaries Boulez and Stockhausen, who attended Messiaen's informal composition courses in the later 1940s. Like many of her colleagues, she was drawn not to the immediate past but to the great Renaissance contrapuntalists, and she found inspiration in Messiaen's experiments in rhythm as well as in his practical expansion of ensemble sonority. In addition to a fine sense of timbre, she carved out a unique niche with her love for the voice; many of her earliest published works include voice. One of her first major successes was Quatuor II, for voice and three strings (1964); this and others of her works, including the large ensemble pieces J.D.E. (1966) and D'Un Opéra de voyage (1967), received high-profile premieres at the concerts of the Domaine Musical. Later important works include three string quartets; a triple concerto for string trio and wind ensemble; Stances for piano and orchestra; a setting of her father's poetry for baritone and orchestra, Liring Ballade, the hour-long music theatre pieces L'Ascension du Mont Ventoux (2004) and Well Met 04, premiered last year, and three operas: Le Pavillon au bord de la Rivière (1975), Le Cyclope (1986), and Schliemann, the latter an evening-long work premiered in Lyon in 1995. A collection of her writings was published (in French) as Molto espressivo in 1999.

Jolas has taught extensively, most importantly as Messiaen's successor at the Paris Conservatoire beginning in 1995. She has also taught at Harvard, Mills College (where she held the Darius Milhaud Chair), Yale, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Southern California, as well as at Tanglewood. Most recently she was in residence last summer at Tanglewood, where a concert was given in honor of her eightieth birthday. The present orchestral work, B Day, continues the celebration. The composer's comments on the piece (both English and French versions are hers) read:

Une grande fête pour les 10 ans du BMOP (Boston Modern Orchestra Project) et les 80 ans de Betsy. C'est ce que je voudrais évoquer au cours de cette étrange série de variations sur la célèbre chanson, que chacun ici entonne à sa guise, comme souvent au cours d'une fête, au hasard des rencontres.

[A Big Boston Birthday party for the BMOP (10) and Betsy (80)! This is what I would like people to imagine as they listen to this rather unconventional set of variations on the well known birthday tune, with everyone joining in and out as often happens in parties.] --Betsy Jolas

This single-movement piece is about sixteen minutes long. Without giving away the work's many surprises, I may point out its rich but impressionistic, even pointillist, orchestral textures, tiny motifs juggled among the instrumental sections coalescing into identity. Beyond an array of imaginative orchestral sounds, we encounter sounds from out of the ordinary, and not a little bit of party atmosphere.

PASCAL DUSAPIN (b. 1955)
Galim
Coda

Pascal Dusapin was born in Nancy, France. His early experience in music was primarily as an organist, and he performed jazz on both organ and piano; he was also aware of the music of Varèse. He studied art, art history, and aesthetics at the Sorbonne and organ at the Schola Cantorum à Paris, and though he took Messiaen's course at the Conservatoire, he came away with a strong distaste for the entire faculty. More helpful were André Boucourechliev and Franco Donatoni, and Dusapin also studied with Xenakis for several years. This was a strong foundation for a career and a prolific output that avoided the commonly followed, IRCAM-situated path of many of his colleagues.

Dusapin has produced a catalog of nearly 100 works, ranging from solos to orchestral works of Xenakis-like mass, as well as several big theater works: Roméo et Juliette, Medea-material, La Melancholia, To Be Sung, and Perelà, "Uomo di fumo." He has a particular affinity for large ensemble works, which make up a major part of his work list. Five of these big works he refers to as "Solo for orchestra"--Go (1992), Extenso (1994), Apex (1995), Clam (1998), and Exeo (2003); there are also several concertos for soloist with large or small ensembles.

Dusapin's music has an object-like palpability that it shares with Xenakis's and Varèse's music with its massive textures and walls of sound with brilliantly fluid surfaces. One imagines the keyboard performer in Dusapin melding with a master of the highly developed crafts of orchestration and formal design. Perhaps paradoxically, there is also in Dusapin's works a referential quality that draws it close to drama, although usually without a traceable programmatic or illustrative content. In his concertos, for example, the protagonists are cast as characters, establishing personality, mood, and point of view rather than taking part in some narrative action. A specific instance is his trombone concerto Watt, whose title is that of a 1953 Beckett novel. The soloist takes on the mantle of Beckett's blunt angry-funny title character, and is frequently moved to cries of hollow, half-ironic anguish. Like Beckett, Dusapin has little interest in the forwarding of a story line, being more concerned with the work's existential environment. His music has an absorbing immediacy in its sensual concern for sound itself, as well as a lingering presence in the listener's memory for its unfolding, subtle shifts in expressive perspective.

The two pieces on this program by the French composer Pascal Dusapin are relatively constrained works, the earlier of the two, Coda (1992), being a single movement of some twelve minutes for a thirteen-member chamber ensemble, and Galim (1998) a ten-minute concerto for flute and string orchestra. They are quite different from one another in character, Coda spiky and excited, Galim a sustained meditation on a two-note idea.

Galim takes its title from the Hebrew for "wave;" it is subtitled "Requies plena oblectationis": "rest full of delight." Dusapin dedicated the piece to the memory of his stepmother Annie Dusapin. He wrote Galim as a competition piece, and it was first performed by the finalists of the Rampal Competition with the Ensemble Orchestral de Paris, Stéphane Cardon conducting, at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on November 7, 1998. Galim is a wave in that its ebb and flow are an oscillation between two pitches a whole-tone apart (B and C-sharp to begin with, later F-sharp and G-sharp), but the easy oscillation is embellished, made more complex, by excursions to other pitches, sharp leaps that still seem to belong to the flute's quiet voice. The string body acts as a kind of resonant body, broadcasting and sustaining the solo line, thickening the texture, occasionally other lines drifting off in tangents. Fragmentary rhythms dominate the solo part in the center of the work, culminating in a cadenza-like unaccompanied moment. Gradually peace returns, albeit an exhausted peace.

Coda is a mixed-ensemble work that can easily be seen as an offspring of such early modernist large chamber-ensemble (or chamber-orchestra) works as Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments and Varèse's Octandre. Dusapin's mentors Xenakis and especially Donatoni both took advantage of the new tradition of established new-music chamber orchestras like Ensemble InterContemporain and Musikfabrik. It was the latter group, under the direction of the composer Johannes Kalitzke, who premiered Coda at the Donaueschingen Festival in October 1992. Coda is related to the contemporaneous chamber concerto for clarinet and ensemble Aria. An aspect of Dusapin's method that he shared with Donatoni is a propensity to create multiple works from the same materials. (Note also his fondness for one-word, four-letter titles, another point of contact with Donatoni, although in the latter case the titles themselves are textually related). Coda relies on harnessing individual virtuosity into highly active, ever-shifting textures, each instrument acting at once on its own and in glancing consort with each of its fellows in the articulation of a complex but unstated melody. The result is a kind of heterophony akin to that of Berio's Requies, and also similar to what happens, in less aggressive fashion, in Galim. The ensemble is deployed in a specific arrangement onstage, the better to delineate Dusapin's timbral groupings.

BRUNO MANTOVANI (b. 1974)
Le Sette Chiese

Bruno Mantovani was born in Châtillon, France, and studied piano, percussion, and jazz at the Perpignan Conservatoire before enrolling in the Paris Conservatoire to further his studies. He also had lessons with Brian Ferneyhough and Michael Jarrell, received a master's degree in musicology at the University of Rouen, and in 1998-99 engaged in research at IRCAM. He already has an extensive catalog of works in all genres, including several works for orchestra and a score for the 1927 film East Side, West Side. He has worked with such artists as Barbara Hendricks, Pierre Boulez, Paul Meyer, Emmanuel Pahud, and Ensemble InterContemporain. In September 2006 his Cantata No. 1 was premiered at the Festiva Musica in Strasbourg by Neue Vocalsolisten and Ensemble 2e2m. Later this month at IRCAM, two of Mantovani's pieces will be performed: his Le Grand Jeu for percussion and electronics and his Éclair de lune for three snare drums, ensemble, and electronics, receiving its world premiere.

Mantovani has received many awards and recognitions, including a scholarship prize from the Academy of Fine Arts, a grant from the Nadia and Lili Boulanger Foundation, and the SACEM Hervé Dugardin prize. He was invited by Peter Eötvös for a residency at Herrenhaus Edenkoben in 1999, and was in residence at the October in Normandy Festival, in Bologna as part of the Association Française d'Action Artistique "Extra-Mural Villa Medici" festival in 2002, and at the French Academy in Rome in 2004-05. His music is published by Editions Henry Lemoine, which has released two CDs of his work. Mantovani's compositional language illustrates a strong sense of instrumental capability, requiring virtuoso technique from the performers and drawing on a wide range of styles from jazz to modernism.

Bruno Mantovani wrote the extraordinary Le Sette Chiese ("The Seven Churches," a destination for Christian religious pilgrims in Bologna, Italy) in 2001 on commission from Festival Musica and the Ensemble InterContemporain, conducted by Jonathan Nott, gave the premiere at the Festival Musica in the Palais de fêtes de Strasbourg on September 29, 2002. This is a significant work, laid out in sections characterized by different instrumental groups, which are positioned onstage in a layout specified in the score. Two groups of six players--first violin, viola, flute, clarinet, trumpet, and horn in to the conductor's left, and second violin, cello, oboe, bassoon, trombone, and trumpet to the right--are positioned near the front of the stage, in front of the conductor, and are each flanked by a percussionist and a keyboardist. Double bass, tuba, and low percussion are centered near the back of the stage, and six more instruments--cello, bassoon, trombone, horn, viola, and clarinet--are positioned in a large semi-circle around these other groups.

There are nine movements, each corresponding to a locale within Bologna or one of the churches; each has its own character. The first four movements make up Part I.

La piazza Santo Stefano ("for Anna") is a gossamer texture, growing out of the fluttering alto flute at the start and colored by woodblocks, microtonal sighs in the clarinet, and intermittent bursts from the brass.

L'eglise de Saint Jean-Baptiste is darker, brass-heavy, and with heavy percussive punctuation. A gradual chromatic rise and crescendo culminates in insistent temple blocks and dissolves in static chords with a high-pitched microtonal chorale.

La crypte is once again transparent, flitting figures in clarinet and strings supporting brief, unison surges of almost stately melody.

La basilique du sépulcre (to Hervé Boutry, general manager of Ensemble Inter-Contemporain) features the two pianos in duet, outlining falling arpeggios. A new exchange of gestures among various instruments intervenes--rapid rising scales and a slower microtonal fall predominate. A tutti climax, then a dying away, feeding on its own resonance. Quiet echoes of previous movements.

Part II begins with Basilique des Saints Vital et Agricola. Brass chords with quarter-tone harmonies form a chorale. This movement is in memoriam Olivier Messiaen, who knew a thing or two about wonderfully strange chorales. The unpitched percussion sing in rhythms evoking Messiaen's birds.

Le cour de Pilate (to Jonathan Nott) is high trills and repeated pitches, thrusting brass notes, a recurring, Papageno-like upward flutter. The rising figure takes on greater weight and begins to dominate the movement. Its end in a static chord begins the ensuing movement, L'eglise du martyrium. A quiet accompaniment of microtonal harmonies supports a violin solo; brief grandiose piano-tuba pronouncements lead to a disjointed brass line, with the percussion color of snares, bass drum, and cymbals calling up a skewed martial mood.

Le cloître hangs on a pedal note (A) first heard in the horn, but which expands to take in other instruments as brief punctuations occur in other parts of the ensemble. A new pedal (F-sharp) ushers in the start of La chapelle du bandeau, its darker tone recalling that of L'eglise de Saint Jean-Baptiste, the second movement. At the close the pilgrim is buoyed by the sound of distant bells.

The following comments by the composer preface the score of Le Sette Chiese:
Le Sette Chiese stands apart from the rest of my output by reason of its long length, the musicians needed (a large ensemble divided into four spatial groups), the time I spent on it (more than six months, which is quite exceptional for me) and its architecture. I did not want to make a summary of what I had already done (or rather, what I already knew how to do), but preferred to take this vast fresco as a means of enlarging my range of expression, like an experimental plot of land in which I could open up new avenues in my work. There is almost nothing left of the abrupt juxtaposition of contradictory elements, nor of the reference to popular music (which are typical of my musical languages). Instead we are left with introversion, sobriety and the rarefaction of the matter used. I took my inspiration from the group of "seven churches" in Bologna (a unique architectural complex which was begun in the first century B.C. and completed at the end of the Renaissance, comprising various buildings that are literally embedded in each other). The architectural originality of the whole, as well as its religious function, provided sources of reflection on space and its poetry. The work that I wrote, lasting thirty-seven minutes, brings face to face four groups (two more or less symmetrical ensembles which are generally antiphonic, plus a trio of the lowest instruments at the back of the stage, and six musicians higher up in a semi-circle). Various dimensions of the space thus used are conflict, gradual occupation, focalization, fragmentation, and globalization. These principles already provide a means of giving rhythm to the form, via the two suites composed of some nine contrasting movements. --Bruno Mantovani

Copyright 2005 Robert Kirzinger. Robert 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.