Program Notes

Composers, like everyone else, live in the world. It's sometimes hard to keep this in mind (or convenient to ignore it) and composers, more so than purveyors of the other arts, are frequently regarded as esoteric, their works hermetic. We as an audience have, perhaps, a prejudice toward some pure acceptance of (supposedly) abstract musical terms, a prejudice which has been encouraged explicitly or covertly time and again by composers themselves--think of the coyness with which Mahler released or suppressed programmatic outlines of his work. Listening to music, can we know too much? Can we know too little? Does thinking about the hostile presence of Napoleon's army in Vienna during the premiere of Fidelio confuse and obscure our reaction to the music, or does this knowledge illuminate and clarify? What of the origins of Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments as an homage to Debussy? If we don't know this stuff, are we left out in the cold?

The presence of Louis Andriessen's works on these two programs triggers a cascade of these reflections on music's--that is, an individual's music's--relationships outside itself, how a composer's cultural connections become manifest in his work. And vice versa: it's a feedback system. Composers' life experience is somehow reflected in the music they produce, even if the general predilection or specific incident be unapprehendable to the listener or even to the composer him/herself. Any information has the potential to enrich our next experience (not only in this context, but in any context). None of the composers here can be described as an ivory-tower artist: a generous receptiveness to outside stimulation is a big part of each of these major voices in contemporary concert music.

Of the four works by Louis Andriessen (b. 1939), all are relatively recent, Zilver (1995) being the earliest, so we have in some sense the fruits of a decades-long development of the culture of new and concert music generally and Andriessen's music specifically. Born in Utrecht, the Netherlands, Andriessen is from a family of musicians. His father (Hendrik) and uncle (Willem) were accomplished composers, as is his older brother Jurriaan, who introduced him to jazz. Louis studied at the Conservatory of the Hague and received a stipend to study in Italy with Luciano Berio in the early 1960s.  Although he quickly absorbed many of the philosophies of the Darmstadt avant-garde, the breadth of his interests rivaled that of his teacher. He was drawn not only to formal processes and intricacies of musical craft but also to social and populist concerns, some of which he felt were in conflict with the apparently elitist foundations of the world of high art.

In this Andriessen shared, in spirit if not in detail, the leftist bent of such composers as Cornelius Cardew and Frederic Rzewski, as well as Berio himself. In 1969 Andriessen was part of an incident disrupting a performance of the Royal Concertgebouw orchestra, and like many Americans of his generation (Rzewski, Steve Reich, Philip Glass) and the British Michael Nyman, he turned to the do-it-yourself ensemble for performances of some his works beginning with De Volharding and later, Hoketus. Gradually, as such things happen, Andriessen's rejection of aspects of the status quo has been tempered by the status quo's desire to have Andriessen's music. His "permanent abandonment" of the orchestra as a medium has in part been mitigated by the orchestra's changing to meet the needs of his work in such pieces as De Snelheid ("Velocity"), commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony, and the big quasi-operatic De Materie, neither of which calls for "standard" orchestral forces. Andriessen has also experienced great success in the the opera house, with his Writing to Vermeer and Rosa (both with libretti by filmmaker Peter Greenaway). Andriessen has continually reconfigured the details of ensemble to suit his musical needs, and even the venue of his expression often sidesteps the expected. (The extreme example of the latter is a collaboration with the filmmaker Hal Hartley.)

Andriessen has been pigeonholed to some degree with the so-called minimalist composers Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Michael Nyman, but in truth the categorization has never been especially coherent--it ignores too much. Although there are some shared influences and cross-pollination with these composers, Andriessen's music has its own roots, particularly in Stravinsky (note for example the preponderance of woodwind, brass, and percussion sonorities) and the tradition of the twentieth-century avant-garde as well as, for that matter, with Western art and culture more broadly. For Europeans--though this is too big a point to consider here--there was no Cagean break with the past, nor any possibility of such. Cage was no nihilist, for a nihilist needs something to consider as nothing. This is what the European postwar artists had: that something, that history of culture, sustaining the nihilist paradox.

The American composer most amenable to Andriessen's own musical thinking turns out to be the arch-traditional maverick (or is it traditional arch-maverick) Charles Ives. Andriessen's use of appropriated materials (both stylistic and objets trouvé) has always been both a snark at consumerist (i.e., capitalist) addictions and a celebration of the artifacts of our society, high, low, and otherwise. The boundaries between high art and low, as Ives recognized, are artificial ones, and can be adjusted, moved, or done away with according to the needs of the individual. This is at least part of what Andriessen's music accomplishes: the championing of the individual in the language of the masses. Or the championing of the masses in the language of the individual--you decide.

Andriessen's Zilver ("Silver," 1995) and Klokken voor Haarlem ("Bells for Haarlem," 2002) are both process-pattern pieces in the general vein of his Hoketus. Of Zilver, the composer writes, "The idea behind Zilver was to write a chorale variation as Bach did for organ: a long, slow-moving melody, combined with the same melody played faster. The ensemble is divided into two groups: the wind and strings play the sustained melody in chorale-like four-part harmony, and the rest of the instruments--vibraphone, marimba and piano - play increasingly fast staccato chords. The two groups play in canons. Zilver is one of a planned series of chamber pieces named after a type of physical matter. Hout ("wood") is the first, and Zilver ("silver") is the second. The title also refers to the two silver instruments--flute and vibraphone--which start and end the piece." Zilver was commissioned by and written for the California EAR Unit, who premiered it at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on January 11, 1995. The materials and processes of the piece--i.e., canon, the superimposition of two quasi-independent, sonically disparate gestures, and a kind of supersaturated diatonicism (another oblique Stravinsky echo), push what seems like a simple piece into the realm of the not-simple, pulling the listener along with it.

The extramusical stimulus in the case of Arthur Berger's Collage III is that of visual art, and specifically a conceptual approach suggested by collage techniques. Berger's music has a well-deserved reputation for masterful elegance. Born the same year as John Cage, Berger (1929-2003) took a different, in some ways more well-worn, path to his career as a composer. He attended New York University and Harvard, concentrating on musicology. In 1937 he went to France to study with Boulanger, and later studied with Milhaud at Mills College in Oakland, California, where he also taught. His early style was solidly within the world of American neoclassicism and very much of its time. Later he began to incorporate serialist techniques, but this should be considered, and can readily be heard as, an expansion of his essential style rather than a completely new direction. Although he went through an extended fallow period he wrote several major orchestral works, including Ideas of Order (1952) commissioned by Dimitri Mitropoulos for the New York Philharmonic. Most of his major works are for chamber groups.

Berger was an astute commentator on music and a longtime reviewer, working with Virgil Thomson at the New York Herald Tribune and co-founding the still-important Perspectives of New Music in the early 1960s. He was an influential teacher as well, most importantly as a professor at Brandeis University until his retirement in 1980, and thereafter at New England Conservatory. He lived in Cambridge until his death in October 2003.

Berger met the artist Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) while studying in France and the two shared a long friendship. Berger's idea for his own Collage pieces was triggered by Motherwell's collage-prints: "The collage-print was a genre that Motherwell had developed, involving the use of each copy of one print as background for different collages. this gave me the idea that i could do something analogous with certain works that i was thinking of transcribing for instruments other than those for which they were originally written. What would emerge would be not simply a transcription but virtually a new work. For me it sufficed to produce one new 'collage' on the background of a given previous work, rather than the five or six that a prolific painter like Motherwell produced."

Berger's first work using this approach was his Diptych: Collage I, Collage II (1990/95), which was based on a 1984 piece for wind quintet. He wrote Collage III in 1992 for the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, David Stock, director, and dedicated the score to Motherwell. He revised it in 1994. The instrumentation is on the Pierrot-plus model--flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and percussion (the same as for Diptych except for the addition of percussion). The basis of the collage is Berger's Composition for Piano Four-Hands, a work completed in 1978. The result is nothing like transcription, or the additive techniques of Berio's Chemins series; instead, Berger's manipulation of gestural musical objects is similar to the assemblage techniques John Cage used in Sixteen Dances. But rather than "pasting" onto a blank canvas, the canvas is itself the four-hands piano work (at least conceptually). Collage III, like the piano piece, is in nine short sections, and in spite of the added players the texture seems more open and transparent than that of the original. The piano--two hands, here--is still the most prominent timbre, with several solo episodes. Berger wrote, "Formally [Collage III] may perhaps best be described as a fantasy ruminating over limited material and eschewing obligatory traditional contrasts of fast-slow-fast." A handful of tempos regulate an always implicit pulse, and the prevailing impression is that of delicacy and restraint, rewarding subtle listening. Collage III is about fifteen minutes long.

Like Louis Andriessen, Lee Hyla (b. 1952) has been strongly influenced by music of the popular culture, but in his case--an American born in the 1950s—it was the high energy of rock and punk music in addition to the 1960s free jazz of Cecil Taylor and others that soaked into his style, even to the point of his considering a career as a rock musician. The particular intricacies and joys of "classical" composition won out, fortunately for us, and Hyla's career has taken off. Hyla, whose main instrument is the piano, attended the New England Conservatory and SUNY Stony Brook, and started making a name for himself as a composer in the late 1970s. He continued to perform publicly as a pianist until the early 1990s. A professor of composition and head of the department at New England Conservatory from 1992 until the present spring, he relocates to the Chicago area this fall to take up a new position as Wyatt Chair in Music Composition at Northwestern University. Hyla's recent and upcoming projects include The Triadic Coast for orchestra, commissioned by the Tanglewood Music Center and at Tanglewood in August 2005, a work for solo violin commissioned by the violinists Midori and Vadim Repin, and a Concerto for Orchestra for the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, with whom he will be Meet the Composer Music Alive Composer in Residence next season. Many of Hyla's works (including Amnesia Variance) have been recorded; the Boston Modern Orchestra Project released a CD featuring his Trans for chamber orchestra (written for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra), Violin Concerto (written for BMOP), and the Bass Clarinet Concerto.

Hyla's Amnesia Variance, for clarinet/bass clarinet, hammer dulcimer, piano, violin, viola, and cello was commissioned by the Almont Ensemble but premiered by Boston Musica Viva on October 6, 1995. It is one of four "marginally related" pieces (Pre-Amnesia and Amnesia [both 1979], the present piece [1989], and Amnesia Breaks [1990]) with "amnesia" in the title. Hyla writes, "Each of the four pieces deals with music memory or the erosion of it, often juxtaposing contrasting material in sharp relief without the benefit of a transition. The sound of the hammered dulcimer was a fundamental inspiration for the piece, not only because of its vibrant timbre, but also because of its restricted pitch resources." The quick-cut contrasts suggest both Stravinsky and Minor Threat (...perhaps...). Another characteristic of the piece is the tendency for apparently fragmented gestures to cohere in (relatively) stable episodes of ensemble unity.

John Cage (1912-92) was famously influenced by Eastern philosophies, which had a profound effect on his work beginning in the 1940s. His ballet music Sixteen Dances is a little-known work from the early '50s, which is to say it was preceded by The Seasons and the Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano and followed immediately by the Concerto for Prepared Piano and, a little later, 4'33". At the time of The Seasons, Cage had begun using a "gamut" technique of composing in which pre-composed musical objects—anything from a rhythmic cell or melodic fragment to a fully orchestrated and voiced chord—are placed into a time-structure of the sort Cage had been using already since the 1930s for his percussion works. For The Seasons and Sixteen Dances Cage was working with Merce Cunningham, and the temporal structures were devised prior to the creation of the content--the choreography on the one hand, the music on the other—so that Cunningham and Cage could work independently of one another. Cage felt that his gamut technique would free him from the strictures of traditional Western musical notions of progression and musical goals, elevating each moment of a piece to a new independence and importance.

A major influence on Cage's life and work at this time was Indian philosophy, particularly through the works of the Sri Lankan aesthetic critic Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877-1947), who was curator of Indian and Islamic arts for Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. Cage had already drawn on the Indian conception of the year's cycle for The Seasons, and in the Sonatas and Interludes he referred to the conception of the "nine permanent emotions." Sixteen Dances is a series of short pieces based on these nine emotions—four dark and four light, plus "tranquility"--with each emotion separated from the next by an interlude (except between the last movement, Tranquility, and the preceding one, Erotic). Cunningham flipped a coin to determine which emotion begin--the first use of true chance operations in Cage and Cunningham's work. (Although the work has a permanent order of movements, conceptually it could be performed in any sequence of paired emotion and interlude.) Although a general sense of contrast is readily perceptible from one emotion to another, and taken a little further the listener can be fairly certain of ruling out certain emotions for certain movements, it is much easier to begin with the name of the emotion, and let the musical mood conform to that. (Of the sixteen movements, "Fear" is, interestingly, the longest.)

-- Robert Kirzinger