BRIEF 50-WORD PROGRAM NOTES

[with links to their long versions]

Last modified 20 April 2024

ACTIONS [SHARESPACE V]
ACTIONS offers a musical journey across a landscape of six human behaviors. Pre-recorded fragments from the pianist’s materials become the genetic “seeds” for algorithmic procedures. Sometimes they produce local gestures that dialog with the pianist’s actions. At others the computer musician paints an acoustical backdrop against which the pianist’s gestures chatter, twist and turn.

Aether
Aether —"the element formerly held to form the material of the heavenly spheres and bodies. I selected four pairs of properties and arranged them sequentially: airy and tenuous, volatile and rigid, continuous and independent, elastic and cooperative. Airy and volatile begin in opposition, but are reconciled at the end.

Ambages
Written in 1965 as a gift to flutist Karen Reynolds, Ambages is a slow-motion dance with ambiguous phrasing: where does one stop? … the next one begin?

Ariadne's Thread
As with the myth, we are carried along by the wanderings of a melodic thread. The string quartet  members periodically re-group, one soloing, the others weaving around the line. There are intrusions of computer “otherworldly” computer sound but the journey ends peacefully.

...b.a....
Flutist, composer, conductor, Robert Aitken is a longtime friend. For decades, he commuted between Toronto and Frieburg, as Professor of Flute at the Musik Hochschüle there. When asked for a tribute piece to honor his retirement, I amalgamated sections from  … brain ablaze...she howled aloud, where three piccoloists “speak,” as does Bob, with three “voices.”

...brain ablaze...she howled aloud...
The “seer,” Cassandra, appears in plays by Euripides and Aeschylus. Her prophesies set “her brain ablaze” with their ferocity. I was intrigued by the prospect of responding to her portrayals with three piccoloists, each manifesting an individualistic behavior. It then occurred to me that the performers could be placed under similar stresses, so I scored the work so it can be realized by 3, 2, or 1 piccolo, the technical and performative load increasing as the number of performers shrinks.

A Crimson Path
In Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, the Greek King’s return from a decade of war in Persia finds his wife, Clytemnestra, in a fury that can only be assuaged by his murder. My response to the bloody path left by the fated killing involves the passions of a wide-ranging cello line that is countered, intensified, or partnered by a pianist. The three movements are: Dialogue, Dream, and Voyage. The idea for it began with a request from cellist Rohan De Saram, but it then became enmeshed in a larger-scale work for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, ILLUSION.

Dionysus
Dionysus came about by virtue of a curious intersection of the late work of Euripides and the exploration of chaos theory. As my title indicates, the Greek master was primary. I considered not only the contradictory faces of Dionysus (god – man, nourish – destroyer) but the underlying forces, the daimones, that his multivalent presence in The Bacchae manifests. I decided to seek a musical abstraction and restatement of these dynamic strata, seeing in the shear forces between them a source of dramatic power. The work uses an octet, pitting a group including piccolo, clarinet, percussion, and contrabass against another comprising trumpet, horn, bass trombone. and piano. These are assigned to two harmonic strata, and the piece is a relentless exploration of the interplay between them. The only occasional relief is provided by the humane extremity of solo passages for piccolo and trumpet.

Dreaming
During a perilous time, Karen gave me a book (The Dreaming Brain) by the Harvard Psychology Professor, Allan Hobson. Reading about the mechanisms of dreams that occur as the brain ideates in the absence of real world feedback from the senses, suggested a landscape of improbabilities related to Coleridge’s notoriously interrupted vision of Kubla Khan. There are solo instrumental wailings and an outrageous timpani solo as the orchestra converges on an intensely lyrical line that brings my dreaming odyssey to an end.

FLiGHT (string quartet version) is a string quartet based upon my musings over humankind's aspirations to fly. The stages correspond to movements: IMAGINING, PREPARING, EXPERIENCING, and then, observing what has come of the achievement, PERSPECTIVE. The final movement involves a departure from quartet norms: each of the four players has their own independent solo, and the loosely interweave.

...from behind the unreasoning mask
…from behind the unreasoning mask is framed by six simultaneous series of forceful transient events from the computer. They comprise the mask from behind which the live players make their statement. There is a constant interplay of changing attitudes, and the tactics used by the trombonist and percussionist to rise above the electroacoustic transients change in allegorical fashion. The work is carefully notated, but there are improvisatory dimensions.

Here and There
Here and There is an extended composition for speaking percussionist. The vocalized material is from Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing IX. Using a limited set of instruments, the soloist works with three sorts of opportunities: recitation, percussive emulations of speech, and “Arias” that weave together in dense interactions the voice and percussive extensions and mimicry. The central figure is hoping for “a way out, somewhere.” I identified the commonplace phrase “here and there” as the most fundamental pair of many in the text. The “here” identifying a local positioning that challenged and contained, while “there” offers a liberating alternative. The work was developed in close and continuing interaction with my friend and colleague, Steven Schick.

KNOWING / NOT KNOWING
What can an individual “know”? More basically, what does it mean to “know” something? In everyday life, one faces such questions constantly. At particular moments one notices friction between the smooth evolution of thought or feeling that one welcomes and the perplexity aroused by actual events, by the unexpected opinions of others.

KNOWING / NOT KNOWING Stage 1 is a musical work for actor, a trombonist and percussionists, computer processed sound, an a cappella choir, and a “kaleidoscopic chorus” that gives voice to the community in which the work is performed. Projected imagery further dimensionalizes a 90-mninte experience.

A Mind of Winter (SEASONS: Cycle 1)
SEASONS works respond, with stanza-like movement, to Reynolds’s montaged texts. Cycles human (infancy, youth, maturity, age) are paired with cycles meteorological (spring, summer, autumn, winter). In this darkly-mooded movement, trios of instruments – widely spaced – exchange somber phrases connected by circulating musings from a computer musician.

Mistral grew out of an encounter with its numbing namesake in the south of France in December of 1982. The relentless, wind-tunnel chill of this memorable phenomenon became the reference, the “impetus” at the core of a work for pairs of trumpets, horns, trombones, violins, celli, and contrabasses with the mediation of an amplified harpsichord. Both the brass and the string choirs have an ouward (assertive unanimous, blustery) and an inward (reflective, individualistic, quiet) behavior. From a crystalline calm at the beginning, the work culminates in the fiercely intense music of a radiant line. Though Mistral is indebted to a personal experience, it is neither illustrative nor programmatic. Music ends by being nothing less than that... however it begins.

On the Balance of Things
Choreographer Lucinda Childs danced an elegantly geometrical response to Reynolds’s instrumental sextet, itself a weave of cyclical instrumental lines and fragments. Balance includes electroacoustic meanderings of Childs voice, reciting poetic images from Elizabeth Bishop’s thought-scapes.

'O'o
The perils of climate change and the continuing loss of our fellow creatures underlie a poignant tale of the last remaining pair of 'o'o birds on the Island of Kaua'i. My musical behaviors provoke a “coming to awareness” of the need to call: fields of pizzicato points, the gradual occurrence of sustained tones, stable threads weaving into cloud-like strata, intermittent warbles urging the strata into harmonic blocks, and the blocks stretching and fragmenting so as to provide a ground against which the calls and responses occur.

PASSAGE 1 - 13:
PASSAGE is a Performed Event: a non-linear aggregation of original texts read aloud, projected visual images, video clips, live performances, and computer sound spatialization. Each PASSAGE is unique, a new combination of selected materials, and each depends upon the nature of the occasion. PASSAGE offers a unique way of sharing observations, images, sounds, and the unpredictable resonances across them. It is not a “lecture about something, from which an audience member carries away a particular message. Rather, each individual finds his or her own connections. The intent is associative and inferential, not illustrative or explanatory. My texts – some are read live, and others pre-recorded – interpenetrate each other. They are spatialized in real time by a computer algorithm carefully tuned to allow a textual choreography: lines of thought virtually intersect – perhaps challenge – one another.

PASSAGE 1

PASSAGE 2

PASSAGE 3

PASSAGE 4

PASSAGE 5

PASSAGE 6

PASSAGE 7

PASSAGE 8

PASSAGE 9

PASSAGE 10

PASSAGE 11

PASSAGE 12

PASSAGE 13

PERSISTENCE: SHARESPACE VI
(for solo cello computer musician, and spatialized sound) is a study in manifesting – and occasionally violating – a complex and demanding continuity of double-stops (spinning out a continuous two-part counterpoint). An interactive duo comprising a cellist and a computer musician (who manages various computer algorithms that manipulate the character of the performed sound, in addition to spatializing it). An alternative – an “other” -- space lurks behind the apparent tranquility of the respiratory surface continuity. There, the weightlessness of lightning fast articulation is the norm. On occasion, this other world is heard between fissures in the surface continuity, reminding the listener of an unimaginable rush of potential urgency that always lurks beneath the subtly evolving surface. Algorithmic enhancements also dimensionalize the soloist’s journey.

A Portrait of Vanzetti
In 1963, Reynolds was in Cologne, Germany, working at the West German Radio’s storied Electronic Music Studio, with support from a Fulbright Scholarship. He had become interested in social and political issues, and decided to do a work for chamber ensemble, narrator and electroacoustic sound based on a text he had drawn from curiously poetic letters written in prison by the accused anarchist, Bartolomeo Vanzetti. It was premiered at the ONCE Festival in 1963 and conducted by composer Donald Scavarda. The (now) eminent Broadway Director, Jack O’Brien, was the narrator. This is Reynolds’s only directly political work.

The Promises of Darkness
The Promises of Darkness was written in memory of Roberto Gerhard and represents a personal response to his music, humanity, and intellect. Four distinctive instrumental groupings are the vehicles for three concurrent streams of sound: one disjunct and accented, another continuous and measured, and a third, evolutionary and sonically complex. These co-existent streams occasionally reach nodal points during which contrasting, brief “pieces” occur. The whole is continuous, but in four sections: the first dense and exploratory, the second tightly constrained and germinal, the third expressive and more flexible, the last cutting across characteristic allegiances to achieve expressive directness.

Shifting/Drifting
This work is a duet between two “instruments,” one physical (the violin) the other processual (the computer). As the work evolves, there is a succession of contrasting computer-generated sonic landscapes through which the soloist passes. Two ways of moving – also of being – are characteristic of Irvine Arditti: sudden and decisive “shifting” from one position to another as well as a gradual and subtle re-positioning of the hand (or an attitude) – a “drifting.” This work is a response to him as well as to his instrument. This metaphorical journey through musical time is about how the places we visit, the things we do, can take on unforeseen meaning. The same is true of friendship.

Sketchbook (for The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
When Milan Kundera’s enthralling "The Unbearable Lightness of Being” became available in English translation, I was intrigued by his interweaving of narrative directness, parenthetical observations, and occasional philosophical asides. I decided to create an expansively meditative response. A soprano accompanies herself so that the spare piano writing can meld with her voice, producing a harmonic halo around it.

String Quartet 1961
At the University of Michigan, I studied with Ross Lee Finney and the reclusive Spanish master Roberto Gerhard, My primary creative investment at that time was in a a string quartet responding to Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, mon amour. His film alternates between two continuities. The design of the quartet does something similar, alternating at the start from long, relatively stable materials to brief bursts of assertive figuration. These two “forces” alternate, with the long diminishing in duration and the short lengthening so that there is a “cross-fade” of experiences not unlike the patterns in Haruki Murakami’s seemingly unrelated strands of narrative that eventually resolve themselves.

Thoughts, Places, Dreams
At a festival in Dijon (It was amusingly titled “Why Note?”) I encountered an astonishing young cellist, Alexis Descharmes. His precise passion was singular, and we developed a collaborative relationship that has lasted decades. The group with which he was affiliated (Court-Circuit) obtained a commission for me to compose a chamber concerto for him. Drawing upon fragments from works already composed for Alexis, I devised a kind of individual hall of mirrors that is unbroken through the work. Unusually, I composed the entire solo before writing any of the ensemble music. The central line carries the  ”thoughts” which, in turn, travel through occasional “Places” and “Dreams” provided by the ensemble. The completed work was premiered at the Venice Biennale in 2013.

Toward Another World: LAMENT [SHARESPACE IV]
(for solo clarinet, multichannel computer sound, and optional real-time spatialization) … arose from Euripides’s masterful Iphigenia in Aulis, and reflects the stages through which Iphigenia passes, as a result of her father, Agamemnon’s, decision that she be sacrificed: I. Innocence [gentle, regular character of disembodied triplets;, II. Awakening [more animated, irregularly punctuated by materials that are at first anxious and furtive, then become alarmingly assertive]; and III. Resolve [a jagged, defiant line marked by violent and resolute attack types]. Materials from Toward Another World were used in ILLUSION (2006), commissioned for Esa-Pekka Salonen by the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s New Music Group, the Koussevitzky and Rockefeller Foundations.

Transfigured Wind I and IV
A carefully refined point of origin is valuable in that it can be expanded, re-shaped, and elaborated while maintaining an original character that ensures a kind of genetic continuity. In 1965, Karen asked me to write an essential flute solo, something akin to the wondrous Syrinx. The result was Ambages, a balletic study on impulse, balance, and peril. Years later, recognizing the power of digital reformulation, I revisited Ambages and transfigured its content into a new, four-part work that can be played with or without a computer-generated meta-mirror of sonic reflections.

Transfigured Wind II and Transfigured Wind III
We anticipate, reflect, recall, sometimes absorbed in specifics, at other times adrift in larger, less well-defined worlds of impression. In Transfigured Wind III (and its parallel form for full orchestra, Transfigured Wind II), both compositional strategies and the marvels possible with digital processing enable a dream-like montage of prefiguration as well as recall, of simultaneous overlays that dimensionalize the temporal aspects of the work’s ongoing fabric. A listener is immersed in a field of sonic choreography arising out of the soloist’s formative lines.

Watershed I
When Steven Schick joined the faculty of UC San Diego’s Music Department, we already knew one another. But we had not collaborated, and it immediately became clear that this was desirable. I developed a concept involving four families of instruments (skins, metals, wooden snare drums, and small noise makers [“oddities” as we called them]). My thought was to consider the families as parallels to the traditional 4 strings on a violin or cello. Steve and I began a year-long exploration of set-up design, periodically adjusting the positions of instruments and trying out my musical ideas. The resulting work involved an elaborate design in which a dominant role for the skins was transferred (at a watershed moment) to the metals, leaving the chastened drums to “sing” at the close.

Watershed III
As had been the case with a 1984 work, Transfigured Wind for solo flute, electronic components and ensemble, it made sense to develop alternate ways of supporting the necessary, central soloist of the new percussion project. In the case of Watershed III, a soloist is complemented by a chamber orchestra, so that, while her/his materials remain central, they are embellished by an instrumental complement that expands the content of appropriate sections of preexisting Watershed I and IV passages. This version was premiered at the 1997 ICMC in Thessaloniki.

Watershed IV
My collaboration with Steven Schick grew to encompass two other new arrivals at UC San Diego Music Department in the mid-1990s: Miller Puckette and Peter Otto. The intricate superimposed spirals of instrumental families imbedded in the surround percussion set-up we developed suggested the possibility of real-time computer spatialization. This would allow an audience to experience something parallel to the constantly changing sound choreographies experienced by the surrounded percussionist. The soft- and hard-ware apparatus necessary to allow such processing in that era required equipment that took up a Volkswagen-sized set of packing crates. We travelled to Asia and Europe transporting all of the requisite equipment with us in order to present the full dimensionality of Watershed IV to international audiences.

Watershed V
Danish percussionist Mathias Reumert wrote to me asking whether I could possibly consider reducing the elaborate 6-channel electroacoustic apparatus necessary to perform Watershed IV to a less cumbersome, even to a “stereo” version. I was hesitant, but it had become clear in intervening decades that what had originally seemed an unstoppable trend towards widely distributed 5.1 sound systems turned out to be stoppable after all. I realized that the essential issue was finding a way to emulate the reverberant glow that the computer surround-system had provided. I developed a strategy for extracting from the appropriate instrumental source, spectral information that allowed the production of what I called a “shimmer” effect. This process, undertaken collaboratively with computer musician Jacob Sundstrom, resulted in what we called an effect that not only replaces the original spatialization but enhances the whole.

Whispers Out of Time
I have made it a practice throughout my creative life of taking advantage of occasions during which I found myself in a new geographical environment. A Valentine Professorship at Amherst College in 1988 led to an interest in poetry and particularly an enigmatic poem by the American master John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. This rumination on the place of the artists relative to the larger contemporary world, and that of others at different periods, led me to write a six-movement string ensemble composition that responds to the poem’s striking imagery:  I. The Soul Is a Captive, III. Like a Wave Breaking on a Roc, or VI. The Portrait’s Will to Endure. As the poem mentions Mahler and Mahler, in turn quotes Beethoven, I used harmonic materials intended to suffuse my entire work with the past’s sonic resonances.