Program Notes

Program notes by Steven Ledbetter

MICHAEL McLAUGHLIN (b. 1964)
Murder (World Premiere - selected score from the 7th annual BMOP/NEC Composition Contest)

Born in the greater Chicago area, Michael McLaughlin currently lives in Boston, where he is completing a Doctorate of Musical Arts in Composition at New England Conservatory as a student of Lee Hyla. He received a master's degree in composition in 1999 at Tufts University, where he was a student of John McDonald. His Bachelor of Music is from Berklee College of Music. He currently teaches a Klezmer performance class at Tufts University and lectures at Bristol Community College.

McLaughlin is active as composer, performer, and educator. He is the pianist/accordionist and composer/arranger for the Klezmer band Shirim and "radical Jewish music" group Naftule's Dream. He has performed and recorded widely with both bands in Europe and the United States. They are currently working in collaboration with children's author Maurice Sendak on a Klezmer version of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf.

McLaughlin has worked on two public radio specials produced at WGBH with Ellen Kushner host of Sound and Spirit; the first, The Golden Dreydle: A Klezmer Nutcracker as a member of Shirim, the second, Esther: The Feast of Masks, as music director arranger, composer and multi-instrumentalist.

His compositional output spans many genres. Jazz, popular, various styles of world folk music and modern concert music all inform his music, which frequently involves improvisation and aleatoric processes. His music ranges cheerfully from serial to the neo-romantic/classical styles. The composer offers three thank-you's: to Norm Davis for supplying the scene of the crime, Lee Hyla for aiding in finding the right weapon to use, and Gil Rose and the musicians of BMOP for being willing to get their hands bloody. Michael McLaughlin offers the following commentary on his piece:

Murder uses what I call a cinematic form. Like many mystery movies and even novels the scene opens with the climactic event and then the movie flashes back to look at all the events that led up to the climax.

In the opening we enter a scene where a murder is taking place. However, before the murderer is exposed we flashback to three suspects: "The Pious," "The Trickster," and "The Morose." Each of these sections is presented through a different style, not instrumentation; but within each section I used a soloist to express the victim and his interaction with the suspect: Oboe for "the Pious," trumpet for "The Trickster," and cello for "the Morose."

After we meet the three suspects, there is a small conflict between them. At its climax we enter another flashback, this time a personal look at the victim (a pensive moment that unfolds melodically in the viola section.

After the four expositions, we return to the moments leading to the opening climax. Slowly the music unfolds until we come to the climax heard in the beginning. Because we now have a deeper understanding of the event, the climax itself is changed (seen from a different "camera angle"). At the very end, the murderer is revealed. In the score there are three endings, from which the conductor chooses one.

The entire score is a big "hats off" to composers of film noir and mysteries, especially Bernard Herrmann; I have quoted from three of his most famous Hitchcock scores (Psycho, Vertigo, and North by Northwest) in the "Trickster" exposition.

ELLIOTT SCHWARTZ (b. 1936)
Chamber Concerto IV

Born in New York City, Elliott Schwartz studied composition with Otto Luening and Jack Beeson at Columbia University, where he earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctorate (of education). He also worked privately with Paul Creston. He is the Robert K. Beckwith Professor of Music at Bowdoin College, where he has taught since 1964, including twelve years as department chair; from 1988 to 1992 he also held a half-time Professorship of Composition at The Ohio State University School of Music.

He has served as President of the College Music Society, National Chair of the American Society of University Composers (now renamed the Society of Composers, Inc.), Vice-President of the American Music Center, President of the Maine Composers Forum, and music panelist for the Maine Arts Council. He is presently a board member of the American Composers Alliance.

A prolific writer as well as composer, Elliott Schwartz is co-editor of the anthology Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, co-author of Music Since 1945, and the author of Electronic Music: A Listener's Guide; The Symphonies of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Music: Ways of Listening. He has also written essays and reviews for a wide range of musical journals.

Schwartz's compositional output is entirely instrumental, ranging from works for traditional orchestral or chamber ensembles to unusual combinations including the combination of acoustical instruments with electronic tape. His most recent compositions include a saxophone concerto for Kenneth Radnofsky and the New England Conservatory Orchestra (recently issued on an Albany recording with four other orchestral works by Schwartz), a concert band piece for the Harvard University Wind Ensemble, Water Music for string orchestra and recorded sounds, premiered at the London College of Music, and the orchestral work Voyager premiered by the Portland Symphony Orchestra. His rmost ecent work includes a sextet for clarinet, string quartet and piano, premiered in 2003 by the British performers Kate Romano and the Kreutzer Quartet, and a work for the German Trio PianOVo, By George, which was premiered in Halle (Handel's birthplace) at the 2004 Handel MusikTage festival last June.

There are four chamber concertos featuring, in chronological order, contrabass, piano, clarinet, and saxophone as the solo instrument. Chamber Concerto IV is a 12-minute score composed in 1978 and premiered at the New Music Festival in Bowling Green Ohio, with John Sampen as the alto sax soloist. The work has been recorded, along with Chamber Concerto II and compositions for smaller chamber ensembles on a Composers Recordings CD.

Regarding Chamber Concerto IV, Elliott Schwartz wrote the following comments for the recording booklet:

Texturally, dramatically or even visually, the work can be perceived as a study in "levels" and juxtapositions. As the ensemble has been divided into distinct strings, brass, clarinet and percussion forces, which are separated antiphonally on stage, the soloist is obliged to interact with these, even to the point of moving about the performance space. Moreover, the soloist, the individual sub-groups and the tutti ensemble each have their own motives. During the course of the concerto's single movement, the interaction of all these motivic fragments and the fusion of tonal and non-tonal stylistic gestures provide equally important clues for perceiving "levels."

WILLIAM THOMAS McKINLEY (b. 1938)
"Childhood Memories" Concerto for Marimba and Orchestra

William Thomas McKinley, born in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, has long been one of America's most active musical figures, equally so in the fields of jazz and contemporary classical composition. He began studying jazz and classical piano at an early age; each tradition has continued to enrich the other in his work. He studied with Nikolai Lopatnikoff and Frederick Dorian at Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh, then with Gunther Schuller and Mel Powell at Yale. An extraordinarily prolific composer, he has written over 300 pieces, received many grants and awards, and heard his music performed by many leading soloists and ensembles. He teaches in both the jazz and composition departments of the New England Conservatory. In addition to being a busy composer, he continues to be active as a jazz pianist. A large percentage of Boston's musicians have studied with him at one time or another; this evening's soloist, Nancy Zeltsman, was his composition student when she was at the New England Conservatory.

McKinley's earlier works were of the most rigorous character, intensely bombarding the listener with complexities of pitch, rhythm, and sonority. In 1979 he began to return to uses of tonality and to a simplification of his harmonic style with the aim of achieving a more direct contact with audiences. This change was reinforced by works written for a number of sterling performers, including pianist Richard Goode and clarinetist Richard Stolzman, who have frequently performed these new works.

McKinley composed Childhood Memories about seven years ago; it was Gil Rose's interest in the piece that has brought about this first performance. As the title suggests, the piece is intended to evoke the world of childhood. Very often the first musical instrument a child receives is a small mallet instrument, like a xylophone with a range of perhaps an octave. The idea of producing musical sounds by striking a resonant sounding body thus becomes a fundamental idea in childhood. Thus it seemed entirely natural to use a concerto for marimba and orchestra to suggest that period of life, when the world begins to reveal itself to the mind of the curious and artistic child.

Childhood Memories consists of a series of short movements summoning up rhythms and melodic gestures that recall the openness, energy, and adventure of a child discovering the world. There are no quotations of familiar children's songs here, simply a sense of wonderment and pleasure in sheer act of creating sounds. Of course in this concerto, the sounds come from more than just the mallet instrument; they are seconded and extended and varied by a large and colorful orchestral part as well. Probably the best way to approach a first hearing of this new piece is simply to think of it as a latter-day Kinderszenen (Childhood scenes) for the 21st century, cast on a somewhat larger scale, and more richly colored, than Robert Schumann's popular piano pieces, but aiming at the same sense of joyous discovery.

DONALD MARTINO (b. 1931)
Concertino for Clarinet and Orchestra

Donald Martino was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, and lives in Newton, Massachusetts; he is emeritus Professor of Music at Harvard University, having previously taught at the New England Conservatory and Brandeis.
Donald Martino's first composition teacher was Ernst Bacon at Syracuse University. In his undergraduate days he was heavily involved with jazz and the music of the Broadway theater as a clarinetist. Even today his music frequently retains reflections, often sublimated, of the harmonic and rhythmic turns of that musical world, and it is filled with indications of his love for the clarinet - evident, of course, in this Concertino. During graduate work at Princeton, where he studied with Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt, he decided to pursue composition as his major activity. Unlike most of the Princeton graduate students in composition, Martino was not yet committed to serial composition; probably the greatest influence on his work at that time was Bartók. But after earning his master's degree, he spent two years in Florence studying with Luigi Dallapiccola, who, though committed to twelve tone composition, always retained the typically Italian concern for a lyrical vocal quality in the melodic line, however complex.

Martino, too, boasts an Italian heritage, and combines Italian characteristics of expressive singing and a sense of the theatrical, even in works designed purely for concert use. During his studies with Dallapiccola he turned to twelve tone music, but, like his teacher, even in his most exacting music, a sense of line emerges out of the richly detailed writing.

Following his studies in Italy, Martino taught at the Third Street Music School Settlement in New York, Princeton (1957-59) and Yale (1959-69). He was chairman of the composition department at the New England Conservatory from 1969 to 1981 and Irving Fine Professor of Music at Brandeis from 1980 to 1983. In 1983 he joined the faculty of the music department at Harvard, from which he is now retired. He received the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for Notturno. In 1981 he became a member of the Institute of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Martino was one of twelve composers commissioned to write a work for the Boston Symphony Orchestra's centennial; the commission was specifically for a work to be composed for the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. The resulting piece was The White Island.

Over the years, Donald Martino has found imaginative ways to treat the traditional musical instruments. He is himself a clarinetist, and his experience as a performer reveals itself in his works, which give special challenges and delights to the player. His B,A,B,B,I,T,T, composed in tribute to his teacher Milton Babbitt, also a clarinetist, on the occasion of Babbitt's fiftieth birthday is for unaccompanied clarinet turned into a "super-clarinet."  It requires the performer to make paper tubes that would extend its length (and therefore lower its pitch), thus making the clarinet into a kind of bass clarinet and basset horn.

The most recent evidence of his devotion to the instrument is this 2003 Concertino for Clarinet and Orchestra. It is a short display piece for the clarinet in three movements reflecting the normal concerto pattern: The opening movement has some characteristics of sonata structure, with two thematic groups and a development section; the second movement is essentially a long accompanied melody for the soloist; and the finale is a rondo.

ERIC CHASALOW (b. 1955)
Concerning Sunspots

Born in Newark, New Jersey, Eric Chasalow graduated from Bates College with degrees in music and biology and took additional studies at the New England Conservatory. He received his DMA from Columbia University, where his principal teacher was Mario Davidovsky and where he studied flute with Harvey Sollberger. He worked in New York City as an arts administrator; since 1996 he has been co-archivist, with his wife Barbara Cassidy, of the Video Archive of Electroacoustic Music.  He is currently Professor of Music at Brandeis University, and Director of BEAMS, the Brandeis Electro-Acoustic Music Studio.

His work has been performed from Beijing and Australia to Berlin, Bourges, and Bratislava. He holds awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

His latest work, Concerning Sunspots, composed in the fall of 2004, was written on a commission from the Fromm Foundation for Music at Harvard, largely during a residency in the early fall at the MacDowell Colony.

Eric Chasalow notes with pleasure that his new piece appears on a program with works by his first two composition teachers, Elliott Schwartz and Tom McKinley - the first time in his career that such an alignment has occurred.

Speaking about his work while it was still in progress, Chasalow offered the following thoughts:

For some years I've been thinking about an opera based on Brecht's Galileo, and one way to start work on an opera is simply to start writing some music (as John Harbison did with Gatsby). When Gil Rose and I began discussing the new Fromm commission for BMOP, and I mentioned my interest in the Brecht play, we found that we a common interest.  It turned out that Gil had attended a production of Galileo when he was a child and it had made a big impression on him; the first act took place in a planetarium. Soon after, I was reading about the Galileo treatise on sunspots from 1613 and thought of excerpting my title from his. I don't usually write a title before conceiving the music, but this one offered itself along with a series of cultural references that could be connected to what would happen musically.

From the start, my piece was influenced by the culture of early 17th century Italy. I thought about the connectedness in the world at that time of science and art and how during the same period Monteverdi was composing his great opera, Orfeo (1607).  Here were two giants, Galileo and Monteverdi, both drawing together all the precedent influences available to them to create something new and totally original.

My own music often includes literal quotations from older composers (though I hate the label "postmodern" that is so often applied to composers who do this - it is not a label that applies to my approach).  My earlier piece for BMOP, Dream Songs, has literal quotes from Bach and Berlioz. But these show up as a kind of memory - they add a particular resonance of memory to the music.  It is not important for the listener to recognize the chorale melody Es ist genug or make the connection Bach to Berg to me and the many others who have since used the quote.

In Concerning Sunspots, my thought was to use elements of Monteverdi's Orfeo - the opening toccata, bits of the second act (in which Orpheus mourns the death of Euridice and determines to fetch her back from the Underworld).  Principally, I'm using the rhythmic character (from the frotola dance form) and the modal scale fragments extracted from the Monteverdi.

This is a piece for big orchestra, which may seem to contradict the idea of working with early Baroque material. I do two things to reconcile this conflict.  Much of the piece is like a concerto grosso, pitting small groupings against the tutti.  I also tend to constantly cycle back to brief statements of the Monteverdi motives, so that we experience a reimagined ritornello form.

Concerning Sunspots receives its world premiere this evening.

Copyright 2004 Steven Ledbetter

Steven Ledbetter is a writer and musicologist living in Boston.