Our title, Anti-War and Mildly Violent: Music Mirroring the Moment, concerns the interfacing of music and ethical life. Morris Rosenzweig's Past Light uses "musical dialects" from other times, and Mario Davidovsky looks back in Flashbacks to moments from other composers' visions which have haunted him. Steven Ricks tries to find "acceptable violence" in the world of children. David Felder, inspired by a Pablo Neruda poem dealing with nostalgia and isolation, looks for a momentary respite. The final work, Harvey Sollberger's The Advancing Moment, begins with the instruments divided into two groups, the "bird-like and fleeting" and the "armored and scaly," trying to cooperate but rarely doing so. And it ends with "Catastrophe"!
Born in 1934 in Médanos, Buenos Aires, Mario Davidovsky began his musical studies at the ago of seven, continued his education at the Collegium Musicum, and graduated from the Bartolomé Mitre School in Buenos Aires in 1952. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, director of the Koussevitzky Foundation at the Library of Congress, director of the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University, and founder and vice president of the Robert Miller Fund for Music. Davidovsky has received a Pulitzer Prize and awards from the Association Wagneriana, the Asociación Amigos de la Música, BMI, Brandeis University, and the National Institute of Arts. He is a professor of music at Harvard and Columbia Universities and chairman of the Electronic Music Center at Columbia University.
I often wonder why our memory sometimes retrieves a tune, a harmony, a rhythmic gestures, seemingly involuntarily. A tune that we have not heard or sung for years will surface for no apparent reason. Sometimes the retrieval is very complex, multi-layered, though the elements seem unrelated or illogically compounded.
In like manner, Flashbacks is musical fantasy attempting to make an intelligible musical narrative out of an apparently chaotic landscape.
M.D.
David Felder's works have been featured at many international festivals for new music including Holland, Huddersfield, Darmstadt, Ars Electronica, Brussels, ISCM, North American New Music, Geneva, and Aspen. He has continuing recognition through performance and commissioning programs by such organizations as the New York New Music Ensemble, BBC Orchestra, Arditti Quartet, American Composers Orchestra, and Buffalo Philharmonic.
Currently, Felder is Professor of Composition at SUNY Buffalo, where he has held the Birge-Cary Chair in Composition since 1992, and has been Artistic Director of the June in Buffalo Festival from 1985 to the present. In 2002, he received one of the first awards from the SUNY-system wide Chancellor's Office for Excellence in Research and Creative Activity. His works are published by Theodore Presser, and a first full CD of his works was released to international acclaim (including "disc of the year" in chamber music from the American Record Guide) on the Bridge label.
Coleccion Nocturna was composed in 1982 and 1983 for the clarinetist William Powell, and the pianist Zita Carno. It exists in two versions: one for the two instrumentalists and four-channel tape, and the other for soloists, mid-sized orchestra, and tape. On the technical level, the piece takes a wholly self-contained musical object from a work that I composed for solo piano, entitled Rocket Summer, and develops into five extended variations. The segment itself is about thirty seconds duration and was selected because of an emotional profile that I found to be quite resonant with the extraordinarily rich poem of Pablo Neruda, from which my composition appropriates its title. There are five continuous variations characteristics latent in the original musical and poetic originals as the musical perspective moves progressively distant, and then successively closer by uncovering the musical source. The trajectory of Neruda's poem lent an emotional and psychological context for the music, although not in any moment-to-moment descriptive transcription of imagery. Nevertheless, the haunting isolation, and fecund nostalgia bloated with romantic yearnings become explicit as a fertile ground for the composition at the close, only in retrospect.
D.F.
Morris Rosenzweig was born October 1, 1952 in New Orleans, where he grew up among the tailors, merchants, and strong-willed women of an extended family which has lived in southern Louisiana since the mid 1890s. His works have been widely presented throughout the United States, as well as in Denmark, Sweden, Holland, France, Germany, Japan, Argentina, Mexico and Israel. Among the noted ensembles who have brought these works to life are Speculum Musicae, "Piano and Percussion", the Leonardo Trio, the Abramyan Quartet, the Chamber Players of the League-ISCM, EARPLAY, Philippe Entremont with the New Orleans Symphony, and Joseph Silverstein with the Utah Symphony.
Presently Professor of Music at the University of Utah -- where he teaches composition, theory, contemporary performance practice, and directs the Maurice Abravanel Visiting Distinguished Composers Series -- he has formerly held positions at Queens College and New York University. He was educated at the Eastman School of Music, the University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia University. His recorded compositions are available on Albany Records-Troy 710, Centaur 2103, CRI 705, and CRI 787.
Past Light was commissioned by, and is dedicated to the New York New Music Ensemble, whose members I have enjoyed a joyous professional relationship with for over 20 years.
The three movements are "One Thread Within It," which is divided in three unequal sections and employs the four instruments in equal degrees. The second, "All Together," features each instrument in a solo capacity; these solos are cast against individually designed backdrops; the basic ingredients of the four instruments' solos sound simultaneously at intermittent points in the movement as well. The third movement, "Wide Open," is a concise set of characteristic variations on an ever-changing theme, whose origin is imagined.
The work is scored for clarinet/bass clarinet, violin, cello, and piano and cast in three movements totaling about 15 minutes. The commission was funded by the Argosy Foundation.
M.R.
Steven Ricks is currently Assistant Professor of Composition and Theory at Brigham Young University where he directs the electronic music studio. He holds degrees in composition from Brigham Young University (B.M.), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (M.M.), and the University of Utah (Ph.D.), and he received a Certificate of Advanced Musical Studies from King's College London. His teachers have included Morris Rosenzweig, Sir Harrison Birtwistle, William Brooks, and Michael Hicks.
His awards and honors include three Barlow Endowment Commissions and First Prize in the 1999 SCI/ASCAP Student Composition Competition. He has been a fellow at June in Buffalo and the Composers Conference at Wellesley College, and his works have been performed by many leading contemporary music ensembles and performers including Speculum Musicae, Earplay, the Talujon Percussion Quartet, flutist Rachel Rudich, violinist Curtis Macomber, and pianist Ian Pace.
My wife's favorite home-system video game is rated "E" (everyone), which is followed by this four-word description: "comic mischief, mild violence." I always thought it was a strange combination of words, and chose the final two as the title of this piece because their pairing captured my imagination. I thought of aggressive music as a sort of mild violence that doesn't hurt anyone (hopefully), and realized that much of my music veers towards aggression at some point. The underlying drama in this piece is based on the juxtaposition and interaction of aggressive gestures with more stable or subdued ideas-a juxtaposition suggested by the title. Another dynamic in the piece related to the ideas above is that of the struggle of the individual, and the reaction and then support or opposition of the crowd.
My choice for the title, Mild Violence – and the obsession with thoughts of violence – was also influenced by reflections on the death of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith. 2005 marks the 200th anniversary of his birth and many of my colleagues have been writing pieces related to this commemoration. I suppose this is my offering. The piece is dedicated to the New York New Music Ensemble – an aggressive promoter of the sort of new music I love.
S.R.
Harvey Sollberger has been active as a composer, conductor, flutist, teacher and organizer of concerts. His works in composition has been recognized by the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Koussevitzky Foundation. In his work as a performer, he has given world, American and West Coast premieres of works by Babbitt, Carter, Davidovsky, Feldman, Holler, Martino, Reynolds, Schnittke, Wuorinen and Xenakis. With Charles Wuorinen, Sollberger founded and performed for many years with the seminal New York-based Group for Contemporary Music. He as conducted or had his work performed by the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the San Diego Symphony, the MAV Radio Orchestra (Budapest), the Bari State Symphony (Italy), the American Composers Orchestra and the June in Buffalo Chamber Orchestra. From 1997 to 2005, Sollberger was Music Director of the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus at the University of California, San Diego, where he is currently Distinguished Professor of Music. He currently lives in Iowa and California, and numbers among his non-musical interests such things as American quilts, Labrador retrievers, Aaron Burr, the geology of Iowa and reading in and translating from Italian.
Throughout The Advancing Moment, the six players are divided into two ensembles, Group I consisting of the flute, clarinet, violin and cello while Group II consists of the piano and percussion. The two groups simultaneously present contrasting musical types and figures: 6 for Group I, all in the bird-like vein ("leggero grotesco," "instabile," etc.); four for Group II in the reptilian mode ("ostinati mecanici,""maestoso isoritmico," etc). The two ensembles themselves mutate, are protean and variable in their constitutions. Thus, Group II, as it develops, is added-to in different ways by one or more members of Group I; while Group I, conversely, is always being subtracted-from in different ways to complete Group II. Only past work's midpoint do the two ensembles come to exist in their "pure" forms.
Stravinsky wrote some time back of the cinematic aspects of his "Symphony in Three Movements," qualities suggested by newsreel images of the Allied victory in World War II. In TAM it was not newsreels but CNN and above all the sirens of Riyadh, Baghdad and Tel Aviv - which you'll hear unleashed at the end of the piece - that triggered this music's genesis. What was set loose in the world in the 20th century continues to slouch forward in the 21st, perhaps in the spirit of Yeats's Second Coming. It is to this world of false "truths" and annihilation that TAM addresses itself, if not in a corrective way, at least with some intent going beyond mere description.
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