Program Notes

Programs of works of apparently similar type—keyboard concertos, for example—and era—let's say the past thirty years or so—are fun. In these four recent concertos for keyboard Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project get to work not only with four wonderful composers but also four terrific soloists (although in the case of Anthony Davis's Wayang V soloist and composer are the same). Although all four of these composers work within a modernist aesthetic, their styles are distinctive from one another and variously eclectic. Each has a different take on the challenges and curiosities encountered and invented in writing for keyboard with ensemble.

In every case, those challenges and curiosities have been addressed in a direct and collaborative context, since these pieces were all written originally with a particular keyboardist in mind. As mentioned above, Anthony Davis calls his own number in Wayang V, which is a partly improvised fantasy of jazz and gamelan music. Michael Colgrass wrote his Side by Side for Joanne Kong, whose talents involve playing piano and harpsichord simultaneously. The inspiration for David Rakowski's Piano Concerto is pianist Marilyn Nonken, who has championed many of the composer's piano etudes, some of which find their way back into the fabric of the concerto. Elliott Schwartz wrote the original version of his Chamber Concerto III in 1977 for pianist Dwight Peltzer; he has recomposed the piece, now called Chamber Concerto III: Another View, this year for BMOP. Nina Ferrigno, a BMOP regular, is soloist.

Elliott Schwartz (b. 1936)
Chamber Concerto III: Another View

Elliott Schwartz's Chamber Concerto III: Another View is both the oldest and the newest work on the program. Schwartz wrote it originally in 1977, but revised it this year, tightening the structure and conventionalizing much of the notation. Schwartz is a familiar presence not only to BMOP audiences but in Boston generally. As a teacher at Bowdoin College in Maine for the past forty-three years, he has developed strong ties with Boston's musicians and ensembles. He has studied the area's music history and, although born in New York and educated at Columbia, seems to have become a respectable New Englander with an international career. He has been recognized with numerous high-profile commissions and grants, and his music has been performed extensively in the U.S. and in Europe. Recent works include the symphonic wind ensemble piece Polar Variations for the Bowdoin Concert Band, Voyager for the Portland Symphony Orchestra, and By George, a trio for oboe, cello, and piano premiered at the Handel MusikTage. Schwartz has also been a consistent and active advocate for new music in various capacities as a writer and as an administrator for such support organizations as the American Composrs Alliance and the American Music Center. He has appeared as a visiting lecturer throughout the country and also in Denmark, the Netherlands, France, and England, including Oxford University.

As a composer, Elliott Schwartz has developed a highly evolved traditional technique with guidance from Otto Luening, Jack Beeson, and Paul Creston. He was also influenced by the inclusive atmosphere of the theatrical and multimedia event-music of the 1960s. Among his early works are such pieces as the hour-long Elevator Music, "for at least 12 players [any instruments] in a building at least 15 stories high" (1969) and Music for Soloist and Audience (1970), and other works freed of the traditional concert stage. A great admirer of Charles Ives, Schwartz is drawn not only to that composer's maverick experimentation but also his philosophy of inviting listeners in via broad vernacular reference. His own use of this approach involves both quotation, such as the borrowing of Brahms's Clarinet Trio in Vienna Dreams, and the more oblique use of musical objects or gestures without a strictly identifiable source, cadential figures, chord passages, arpeggios, borrowed from another time and circumstance.

In discussing the general effect of Chamber Concerto III, it's not really necessary to differentiate between the original and revised versions of the work. Most of the changes in the new version can be viewed in practical terms. In the original, Schwartz denoted each musical system as a fifteen-second time interval, within which further partitioning varied from one page to the next, e.g., 3+4+4+4 seconds followed by 2+3+5+4. The start and stop of each gesture might be fixed at the beginning or end of a partition (indicated by a downbeat by the conductor), or it might begin at performer's discretion within a time-span—near the beginning if the figure appeared so on the page, or near the middle, etc. Some of these types of notation remain in Chamber Concerto III: Another View. Otherwise, metric divisions are standardized with a one-per-second quarter-note pulse grouped in 2⁄4, 3⁄4, 4⁄4, etc., a simple translation from the original, but attack and release of figures are now mostly fixed within these measures.

The work proceeds in a single unbroken and continually transforming movement. Gesture is ascendant, the primary one being the accelerating, repeated-note figure with which the solo piano opens the piece. In the busy ensuing textures this fragment takes on the function almost of a motif, abetted by variants of the melodic cells like the one introduced by the flute a few seconds from the beginning. Schwartz's referential bent is somewhat downplayed, although there are long quotation passages, emerging like déjà vu, or rather déjà entendu, and anchoring the middle section of the piece.

The composer provided the following note on his Chamber Concerto III: Another View, which is receiving its world premiere this evening.
"The original version of my Chamber Concerto III was composed at the Yaddo artists' colony during the late summer of 1977, and premiered in 1978 by pianist Dwight Peltzer and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra conducted by William McGlaughlin. The Danish pianist Poul Rosenbaum, [the ensemble] Lontano and conductor Odaline De La Martinez gave the work its European premiere in 1987, at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall. The concerto has also been featured at a number of university new music festivals; on a few of those occasions I performed as piano soloist.

"The opportunity to revise the concerto came about as a result of a long-term project that Gil Rose and I have been engaged in—that of recording all of my chamber concertos with BMOP for inclusion on a single compact disk. (The project is now more than halfway completed.) The prospect of recording this particular concerto provided the impetus I needed to make a number of wholesale revisions. For one, the instrumentation of the original (necessitated by the Viennese Classic dimensions of the 1970s St. Paul ensemble) has been expanded and re-conceived in terms of color. On a different level, the formal structure has been tightened, the original duration shortened, and the notation (originally involving a high degree of performer-choice and free synchronization) more focused.

"The revision of the concerto was begun at our home in Maine during the summer of 2006, and completed in Cambridge, England, early in 2007. In many ways it looks, feels and (I hope!) sounds like a brand-new piece. Paradoxically, though, the essential gestures and the overall spirit of the 1977 remains. Then and now, the Chamber Concerto III derives all its material from the idea of single pitches being extended—either through simple repetition (as with the initial piano statement) or by means of turns, trills and mordents, or through more elaborate melodic decoration. Like much of my music, the work attempts to use tonal-triadic passages for associative rather than structural purposes, by placing them in non-tonal contexts. It also explores ways of dealing with texture as layered juxtapositions—related in part to photographic techniques of multiple exposure, as well as to the music of Charles Ives." —Elliott Schwartz

Tonight's performance of Chamber Concerto III: Another View will be reprised at Bowdoin College on November 10, 2007 and recorded for commercial release by BMOP Sound.

Anthony Davis (b. 1951)
Wayang V

Anthony Davis and his piano-and-orchestra piece Wayang V are making a return to BMOP. He and his piece shared a jazz-oriented program with works of Aaron Copland, Gunther Schuller, and Larry Austin in February 2002. Davis is likely best-known among new-music audiences for his operas Amistad, Tania, and X, The Life and Times of Malcom X, which was recorded and won a Grammy Award. This past season, in March 2007, his fifth opera, Wakonda's Dream, with a libretto by Pulitzer-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa, was premiered to acclaim by Omaha Opera. Omaha Opera commissioned this work about Native American life in contemporary American society. Underlining the significance of the occasion, the opera's first performances were the impetus for the cross-disciplinary Wakonda's Dream Festival, with events taking place over the course of several weeks, including a separate performance of Davis's choral work Restless Mourning, his response to the September 11, 2001 tragedies, and an evening of improvised music. Wakonda's Dream, like X and others of Davis's works, has an undercurrent of activism in its plot.

A student of Jacob Druckman at Yale in the 1970s, Davis is not only well-versed in modern compositional technique but also an excellent and prolific improvising pianist. As a performer he has worked with such artists as Anthony Braxton and Leroy Jenkins as well as his own ensemble Episteme. Davis has taught at Yale, Harvard, and Cornell universities, and since 1998 has been a professor at the University of California—San Diego. As an artist he is an eclectic, steeped in jazz and other African-American sources, American/European modernism, popular music, and world music—his several Wayang pieces take their titles from the Balinese gamelan tradition (Wayang is a general Indonesian term for theater and more specifically for a shadow puppet). For Wakonda's Dream he researched Native American music in Nebraska. He has a strong interest in the theater; in addition to his many operas he wrote the incidental music to the original Broadway production of Tony Kushner's Angels in America and has collaborated on several dance works, including Hemispheres with Molissa Fenley, Dance for the José Limón Dancers, and Wayang VI for two pianos. He has fulfilled commissions from Carnegie Hall for its centennial (the Violin Sonata), the symphony orchestras of Atlanta, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Kansas City, and Houston, and many other ensembles and organizations.

Davis's Wayang V for piano and orchestra is the largest of his six similarly titled works. Although many of the textures and rhythms are gamelan-influenced, American minimalism and jazz are also strongly indicated; jazz is especially evoked through the use of the jazz drummer as well as in harmony and orchestration. The piece is in four movements with an introduction by way of a free recitative. The first big section is a buildup of fast overlapping patterns. The second is a lengthy piano solo over a sparse accompaniment, which flows into a swinging section revisiting some of the pattern motifs from part one. Another long piano solo is backed by fragmentary, pointillistic percussion, then ethereal strings. The final section returns to a strict, driving pulse. The final minute or so acts as a coda drawing on music from the second part. The piece is about twenty-five minutes long.

Anthony Davis's note for Wayang V is below.
"Wayang V (For Piano and Orchestra) premiered in 1984 with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and was performed and recorded by the Kansas City Symphony Orchestra in 1988. Wayang V is one of a number of my compositions inspired by the Balinese Gamelan. Each of my Wayang pieces employs polyrhythmic repetition and improvisation. In Wayang V, after a sustained texture with a piano improvisation, the opening section explores a polyrhythmic texture dividing the orchestra into choirs, which accentuate the repeating rhythmic cycles in the piece. The underlying rhythmic texture employs an ostinato, which can be perceived in 3⁄4, 6⁄8 or 12⁄8 in a 48 beat pattern, which is juxtaposed by an 18-19-17 (54) beat pattern primarily in the winds. A fragmented melody appears in opposition to the pattern and culminates in a 7⁄4 ostinato in the low brass. The section culminates in a rhythmic finish. The piano in this section functions as part of the rhythmic apparatus and emerges in the second section in an improvisational solo. The rhythmic themes of the first section re-emerge as the piece develops in fragmented and more developed versions.

"Improvisation has always been central to my aesthetic conception not so much as an appropriation of a musical tradition but as a revolutionary idea, which allows for the creativity of the performer within a dynamic musical structure. As composers, we are still learning the lessons of Ellington, Strayhorn, Mingus, and Monk as we traverse the dialectic of the notated and the improvised." —Anthony Davis

Following tonight's performance, Wayang V will be recorded for commercial release by BMOP Sound.

Michael Colgrass (b. 1932)
Side by Side

Like Anthony Davis, Michael Colgrass was also a jazz player, although being a generation older he heard and played bop and harp bop in the years before the rise of free jazz. He has lived in Canada for many years, but was born in Chicago, one of the great hotbeds of jazz in the '40s and '50s. At an early age he began playing the drums and was soon playing in professional bands. He studied percussion and composition at the University of Illinois and later worked with Milhaud, Foss, and Riegger. Even after his formal education was completed he made his living primarily as a percussionist in New York City, working with such disparate groups as the New York Philharmonic and Dizzy Gillespie's orchestra.

As a composer, Colgrass's first works of the 1950s were, understandably, percussion-based. In the 1960s he began turning more toward the compositional facet of his career and his scope widened considerably. He gained international attention with such works as his As Quiet As for orchestra, a Fromm commission, which was premiered by Gunther Schuller at Tanglewood and later recorded by Erich Leinsdorf and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Soon thereafter, he stopped playing and composing for one year, becoming deeply involved in dance and theater and studying mime and traditional troupe theater in Europe. This experience led to major changes in his approach to music, writing numerous new works with orchestra, many with soloist; several chamber operas, and a number of songs and oratorio-type works setting his own texts. He also began to organize creative workshops for musicians and performers and, later, for all types of pursuits requiring creativity, including working with and writing for children. He moved permanently to Toronto in 1974.

Another aspect of his musical development began in 1984 with his first work for wind ensemble, Winds of Nagual, commissioned by New England Conservatory. This led to a number of further wind-ensemble commissions, including Urban Requiem, Arctic Dreams, Dream Dancer, and the most recent, Raag Mala, all of which have been recorded multiple times and are repertoire favorites. He has written for youth bands. As a natural extension of his workshops in performance and creativity, he wrote a novel/handbook called My Lessons with Kumi, published in 2000. His method of teaching children how to make their own music was adopted as part of the curriculum of the Longmeadow, Massachusetts school system in 2003.

Doubtless because of his experience as a percussionist, Colgrass has a predilection for novel sounds, combinations of instruments, and gestures that evolved out of the act of performance. His music is strikingly colorful, impressionistic, with organically developing structures. The main part of his work has been for soloist or small ensemble with orchestra, including such works as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Déjà vu for four percussionists and orchestra. His recent Crossworlds for flute, piano, and orchestra was commissioned and premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, flutist Marina Piccinini, and pianist Andres Haefliger.

Colgrass wrote Side by Side for the pianist/harpsichordist Joanne Kong. The Boston Modern Orchestra Project was one of a three-orchestra consortium that commissioned the work, along with the Richmond (VA) Symphony and the Esprit Orchestra, which gave the premiere with Ms. Kong in Toronto on May 13, 2007. The present performance is the second world premiere. The commission was funded in part by fifteen private donors enlisted by Joanne Kong and the Richmond Symphony.

The opening of Side by Side, with its orchestration of mallet percussion and harp along with the solo harpsichord, lends the piece an immediate dream-like quality that obtains even through the many changes in mood. The one-movement work of about twenty-five minutes' duration is episodic, events leading one to another but with recurrence of material, such as the harpsichord's revisiting the viola-flute duet that occurs near the beginning of the piece. As he states in his comments about the piece (below), Colgrass sets up a dichotomy between the harpsichord and the piano, so the soloist must navigate not only between the two instruments but quickly between styles as well.

Michael Colgrass writes:
"Side by Side was inspired by soloist, Joanne Kong, who is known for playing both the harpsichord and the piano. I first saw Joanne in a photo of her sitting at both keyboards, which were placed at right angles to each other suggesting that she could play both instruments from the same position. This image gave me the idea of featuring her on two keyboards at once. However, this juxtaposition presented a problem because harpsichord and piano are so different in volume and carrying power.

"The harpsichord is delicate and cannot sustain pitches, whereas the piano is powerful, even percussive, and its notes can ring freely. To create more of a balance between the two instruments I decided to subdue the piano with tuning mutes, the little rubber wedges used by piano tuners to isolate the overtones of each string. The odd and unpredictable sounds that result suggest a clownish, satirical personality that is worlds apart from the elegant and subtle harpsichord. Since both instruments are quiet in volume I decided to amplify both to match the weight of a full orchestra.

"The function of the orchestra is to create a distinctive world for each instrument. The harpsichord's fragile and crystalline nature suggested to me celesta, harp and vibraphone; whereas the sound of an altered piano is more clunkish and comic, complemented by cowbells, wood blocks and kitchen bowls. Over the course of the piece the two instruments come closer together and gradually become one, making a blend of their disparate natures. Side by Side is respectfully dedicated to Joanne Kong."  —Michael Colgrass

David Rakowski (b. 1958)
Piano Concerto

David Rakowski's Piano Concerto, a BMOP commission and Koussevitsky Foundation grant recipient, receiving its world premiere this evening, is the largest work on the program and in many ways the most traditional: it's called Piano Concerto, it has movements, albeit four, more like a traditional symphonic layout, it employs traditional notation. So where's the subversion? Perhaps in the idea that David Rakowski has written a relatively straightforward concerto, which for him is unusual—he has said that this is the first time he's written a concerto containing no ironic commentary. Certainly there is also subversion in the fact that he calls on the soloist to perform on a two-octave toy piano in addition to the concert grand, and that this does not constitute "ironic commentary."

Rakowski, based in the Greater Maynard (MA) metro area, is an alumnus of the New England Conservatory and Princeton University and was a Fellow of the Tanglewood Music Center. He has taught at NEC, Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia, and since 1995 has been on the faculty of Brandeis University, where he is the Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Composition. He also teaches composition at NEC.

Last season BMOP gave the long-overdue premiere of Rakowski's orchestral work Winged Contraption, in January 2007. He has written several pieces for soloist with large ensemble: the horn concerto Locking Horns; Cerberus for clarinet and chamber orchestra; No Holds Barred for cello and chamber orchestra, and Concerto for violin and chamber orchestra. Recent works include his Dream Symphony for string orchestra for the New England String Ensemble and, completed this year, his big Cantina for wind ensemble, commissioned by the Barlow Foundation for the wind bands of UCLA, the University of Michigan, Brigham Young University, and Southern Methodist University, and the Marine Band. He is currently working on a song cycle for soprano Judy Bettina and Collage, scheduled for next season. His best-traveled pieces are some of his Piano Etudes, which currently number eighty-one pieces (the first was written in 1988) and which figure into the origins of the Piano Concerto.

Like Ligeti's piano etudes, these pieces are studies from both the composer's and the pianist's point of view. Rakowski calls them "snapshots," since they represent one way of looking at one aspect of composition and piano playing at one "moment" of his life. He has placed several constraints on the writing process: each must be completed within six days; there should be no preordained material or schema; and they brook no revision. They are etudes and bagatelles and musical puns or one-liners, as a body vast in their conceptual and technical basis but mostly wee in their individual scope.

The Piano Concerto was written for the remarkable New York-based pianist Marilyn Nonken, who has learned and championed a number of Rakowski's etudes and recorded several. Before the concerto was wholly conceived, Nonken began to seek out an orchestra or foundation to commission the piece. BMOP and the Koussevitzky Foundation stepped up. Rakowski had initially considered creating a concerto from an accumulation of etudes, but decided instead to focus on two: E-machines, the very first etude; and Sliding Scales, written for Nonken in 2001 (No. 33), which inform the first and last movements particularly. Also clearly present at the start of each movement is Plucking A, written for Nonken in 1997 (No. 13). As one might guess, the titles suggest something about each etude, which is the case for all eighty-one of the things. Sliding Scales is, hopefully, obvious; Plucking A becomes obvious when Ms. Nonken reaches into the piano to pizzicato that pitch out of the instrument's depths. E-machines is a repeated-note etude. Snippets of other etudes, probably ungrasped by most listeners, also find their way into the concerto.

Rakowski gives some of the details of the work's composition in the score.
"Begun March 4, 2005, in Maynard, Massachusetts, completed May 11, 2006, Bogliasco, Italy. Minor revisions made in Maynard thereafter. The bulk of the first three movements was composed at the MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire, and all of the fourth movement was composed at the Bogliosco Foundation, Bogliasco, Italy. The composer wishes to express his deepest gratitude to the MacDowell Colony and the Bogliasco Foundation for the gift of time and working space."

The concerto is in four movements. The first movement begins with a slow introduction starting with the plucked A, and moving into an allegro whose texture in the solo part is that of E-machines, that is, rapidly repeated notes, gradually losing this equilibrium and expanding into warbles, then scales. The soloist plays almost constantly, toccata-like, with a mostly sparse orchestral backdrop. The movement closes with a toy piano flourish from the soloist, out of the blue.

The second movement is an adagio, beginning with the plucked A again. The soloist floats in faster figures over the baseline slow tempo, fitting between cellos and high woodwinds and eventually creating a complex multi-tiered texture by itself, an aria immersed in sustained music. Rakowski alludes to three more etudes here: The Third Man (no. 15, based on thirds), Twelve Step (no. 21, based on a twelve-note wedge), and Corrente (no. 10). The toy piano figure at the close of the first movement returns, extended.

The third movement is a jocular scherzo. Everything in the movement is derived from a single rhythm, an idea suggested by the accelerating monoritmicon (repeating rhythmic pattern) of the second scene of Berg's Lulu. The plucked A opens the movement once again before the soloist embarks on passages of syncopated sixteenth-notes with light accompaniment, leading to a series of cascades. The orchestra is at its most active in this movement. One unusual feature here is the percussionists' use of "chatter stones," magnetic oval rocks that chatter when tossed into the air.

The fourth movement is a different view of the first, opening with a slow introduction, the last of the plucked A's. Where the first movement was E-Machines-centered, this one calls on Sliding Scales. It becomes clearer in this movement that the material in both cases can be seen as some aspect of its counterpart, as repeated-note passages emerge out of the scale textures. A passage of repeating E's (E-machines) leads to the concerto's longest break for the soloist (more than seventy measures), which is balanced by a long, written-out toy piano passage (with a Rick Wakemanesque, or Joanne Kongesque, moment involving both pianos) and the big cadenza. Rakowski has written out a cadenza, which includes the toy piano and in the grand tradition pulls material from the main part of the concerto; Marilyn Nonken plays it here. It's also acceptable for the soloist to write her own cadenza or improvise one, à la Beethoven. Following this big expenditure the piano is laconic to the end of the piece, but in its last gestures refers back to the repeated-note figures and scales.

Here at the end it's probably worth bringing to your attention some of the many points of serendipitous confluence that bridge the gaps of stage change, tuning up, and intermission. There are wonderful echoing details, like the repeating-note motifs found in both Rakowski's and Schwartz's pieces (neither knowing the other's piece), and the humorous two-keyboard moment of Rakowski's concerto seeming to be a wink at Side by Side. The gamelan-tinged percussion ensemble opening Colgrass's piece resonates with Anthony Davis's interlocking Balinese patterns, and Colgrass's pastel melodic moments seem to be drawn from a well of archetypes similar to Schwartz's out-of-focus quotations. Schwartz quotes other times and styles in a work of revitalization; Rakowski quotes himself from twenty and ten years past in a piece entirely new. From four highly disparate, different-sounding, wonderful and subversive works emerges a program of unexpected and rewarding unity.