This piece was also performed by the chamber orchestra last semester. To be honest I found it kind of hard to access, but this is a good recording and very lyrical and takes the necessary time, and well-balanced to show off the important lines. These are the program notes I wrote for that concert.
Karel Husa's career as a composer took him from his birthplace, Prague, through Paris, where he studied with Arthur Honegger and Nadia Boulanger. In 1959 he became an American citizen and spent many years in Ithaca as a lecturer at both Cornell University and Ithaca College, retiring in 1992. His seldom-performed Serenade was composed in 1963, about a decade into his tenure at Cornell. In his later years Husa's music became increasingly atonal, but the mood of this fifteen-minute Serenade is, overall, bright and engaging. It was premiered by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 1964.
This work's unusual instrumentation is a diversification upon the original inspiration, a piece called Évocations de Slovaquie (Evocations of Slovakia) written for clarinet, viola, and cello in 1951. The three movements are named for the Slavic mountain, the night, and a lively folk dance; however, these titles are more symbolic than strictly programmatic. A largely serial work, the Serenade nevertheless employs inviting, plaintive tunes and driving rhythms inspired by Slavic folk music.
The serenade opens with a stark, jagged clarinet solo, and the rest of the first movement unfolds in mirror form, as if to mimic the shape of the movement's eponymous mountain. The first section is in a moderate 6/8 scored thinly for winds and harp; strings join in the second section, which is firmer and more regular in rhythm. The music accelerates into a more frenetic middle section, which then slows into abbreviated versions of the first two segments, ending with pointillistic series of pizzicati and harmonics in the strings.
The second movement is marked "tranquillo possibile" - as tranquil as possible. Long melodic wind lines mesh with muted strings until the mood is interrupted for a perturbed, agitated middle section marked by rapid, furious scales and aggressive pizzicati. The movement ends quietly, as it began. In the third movement, driving rhythms and articulations evoke a vigorous folk dance, which accelerates into a celebratory close.
ok, this is not the best recording you can get out there, but the only one i think that's commercially available is the one of the original commission by pittsburgh symphony and i'm not sure i can legally upload it. plus, this recording is one of me! this is the run-through I did of this piece last week when i ran rehearsal. and these are the program notes that i wrote for the concert that this orchestra is performing it on next weekend.
Eric Moe's No Time Like the Present
is a muscular, energetic, and invigorating five-minute exploration of
orchestral rhythm. Commissioned in 1996 by the Pittsburgh Symphony
Orchestra, it was premiered in 1998 by then-music director Mariss
Jansons. It seeks to respond to the proposition of what might have
happened had Stravinsky spent his time in the States absorbing the
rhythms of Detroit's Motown rather than Los Angeles's Hollywood.
The
work opens with a vigorous motor of sixteenths which underlies
fragments of jagged and “funky” rhythms distributed among solo
wind and brass, and interrupted by bars of siren-like triplets. A
horn solo emerges to inaugurate a rhapsodic contrasting mood,
characterized by solos which move to piccolo, english horn, and
eventually, strings. These are punctuated by outbursts from the brass
and percussion, which flare forth and then melt away as quickly as
they came.
A solo
bass clarinet colored by trombones commences the final section, a
series of angular, increasingly extended and instrumentally-layered
swells that crest in sudden explosions and unexpected silences. Bold
triplets in the horn urge the music forward to a percussion-driven
climax which ends abruptly, leaving only the soft glow of a cluster
of harmonics in the celli, like an “afterimage” of the explosion
we have just witnessed.
Moe is
an American composer and concert pianist who is currently Professor
of Composition and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh.
i won't pretend to understand most of this piece, but i would like to talk a bit about the setup and things that are involved in performing it, since we did so just the other week here at school.
this piece is three movements (without break) in 21 minutes, and involves a highly prepared piano along with a bunch of fairly nonconventional percussion. since i wasn't involved in the piano preparation, i'm just going to list the objects that are needed here and move on to a discussion of the other performance setups.
objects needed for the piano: 8 screws, 40 bolts (including headless, black, stove and furniture bolts, bolts in thin rubber casing, 1 bolt with weather stripping etc.), 4 short strips of rubber (or 8 wedges carved from soft rubber erasers), 4 rubber bolts, 1 US penny, 1 strip of felt, 11 strips of soft plastic (wire insulation), and a plastic bridge.
this list is courtesy of Tzenka Dianova, from "John Cage's Prepared Piano: the Nuts and Bolts"
the most problematic item above is the plastic bridge, which is not well described (or even really described at all. the idea is that the bridge rests on the sounding board and produces microtones. the suggestion in this book is a plastic ruler which was trimmed to fit under the indicated strings.
the piece is described as a kind of a middle ground between written out music and cage's "chance" music. he uses a technique called "gamut" which is where he creates and (geometrically) moves across rectangular charts of notes, chords and sonoroties to derive his music. in the first movement, the orchestra music uses one of these charts while the piano is improvisatory and like "free composition,"; in the second, a different chart is created for the piano part, and in the third, both piano and orchestra use the same chart.
below is a recording from youtube.
the piece calls for a number of very unconventional percussion implements, among them a metal slinky suspended from a height and flicked with a fingernail. you can hear this at about 8:08. obviously because of the nature of the instrument it has to be amplified.
another electronic aspect is the boom box/radio which is supposed to be "set to a local station" and played at certain points in the score (usually for no more than one or two seconds). this introduces another element of chance and can result in some spectacularly awkward moments in the performance. (i think 3:29 is one of these, as is 8:46.)
the piece is scored also for an electric "buzzer" which should be audible at just after 8:00, although i can't seem to discern it in this recording (it should be pretty much corresponding with the thunder sheet sound). i think for this we just used a buzzer button amplified.
other unusual implements include a metal garbage can (2:17), various types of maracas and shakers, thunder sheet, and a "water gong," which is a gong that is struck and then lowered/raised into a tub of water, which bends and alters the pitch. there are also a number of points at which one of the percussion people has to go in and scrub some sort of metal apparatus along the piano strings as the piano player plays (orchestral - there is another pianist who plays both a prepared piano as well as a celest, in addition to the concerto soloist) (5:43 is one example of this sound, as is about 6:03); we also amplified this. piano strings can take a lot of abuse, as long as the soundboard isn't messed with too much.
the piece is so spare that we decided to perform it with most of the lights dimmed and stand lights for all the performers. it gave it a sort of eerie and surreal feel. this piece is quite difficult to get into - the only thing i catch on to really is the d minor chord that opens the piece :P
but it's good to keep an open mind. enjoy!
if you would like to see a nice video of this piece being performed, there is a video of the IC chamber orchestra performing it here. i think both the buzzer and the slinky are much more successful in this performance, you can hear both in close proximity from about 22:53 to 23:00. in particular our slinky sounded less like metal rattling and much more like a toy gun :)
because i will have to start writing pretty regular program notes and studying a large variety of scores, i've decided to revive this beginning with the notes that i had to write for the upcoming concert. this is a piece that was written in 2005 by mead composer-in-residence at chicago symphony.
there is a video on the cso website in which clyne talks about the composition of this piece, but i can't get it to load under any circumstances. this is actually a pretty cool short piece in which she is inspired by both visual imagery and dance choreography. the key image is that of an analog video tape being quickly rewound,
with “fleeting moments of skipping, freezing, and warping.”
she also drew a lot of inspiration from the dance choreography of her friend kitty mcnamee, whom she admires for its use of gestures
which repeatedly appear throughout a piece to “build and bind its
narrative structure.” the overall sound is a pretty cool sense of electronic tension which you're hit with almost immediately. a dramatic sustained note opens the piece, colored by lurching
crescendi and diminuendi. strings enter with agitated sixteenths that
are accented in unexpected places, creating a tautness that
repeatedly but unpredictably grows and explodes. there's that stringy, noisy sense that you get when you listen to lots of electronics. clyne also employs a
number of different techniques to recall "warping and skipping": a high whining pitch is supplied by bowed crotales
(small brass disks usually struck with a mallet); brass and strings
are instructed to “bend” pitches and perform slow glissandi over
many bars. in the cso video, she mentions that the gesture she credits as the “kernel” for the entire
piece is the piano's cluster chords, which the player is instructed
to play by striking the keyboard with their entire forearm (a gesture
she remembers performing in frustration during the composition
process before she realized she could actually use it). there is one part close to the end which is at about half tempo and involves some string solos. suggestions on what this part represents? maybe the rewind mechanism is stalling but continuing to try to rewind. the part which brings the piece to a literal level (and also into clyne's specialty of electronic music) is the last thirty seconds: as most of the orchestra falls silent, a short,
pre-recorded segment of the piece is played in high-speed reverse for
the final thirty seconds. so i think in most score/part sets for this a pre-recorded CD is included with the high quality .aiff file. we've put this on an ipod, which will be piped over the auditorium sound system. the "press play" instruction is given to the second percussion player, so it's actually controlled from within the ensemble. the writing around the entrance is such that the recording emerges from the texture, so i think in the case of slight delays in the playback or whatever it won't matter quite so much, and the file is merely played straight until the huge chord at the end which just cuts everything off.
Something easy for today. After I get into the habit of doing this I'll start branching out.
I. Allegro
II. Andante
III. Presto in moto perpetuo
this concerto was written/published in 1939 on commission by this industrialist named Fels and originally was to be performed by one of Barber's Curtis classmates, a violinist named briselli. the entire complicated history of its composition is readable on the wiki page in much more detail than i care to discuss. we'll just note here that briselli rejected the premiere of the work because in his opinion, the last movement needed to be heftier. it's only about 3-4 minutes long (there is somewhat of a competition about how short one can make's one's recording of this movement, which hilary hahn has pretty much dominated thus far at a handy 3:24 and 216 bpm which is actually as fast as my metronome goes. i can't remember the original metronome marking, but it's well below 200... wtf).
because of this work's relative simplicity it's kind of difficult to only do one movement unless i'm planning on doing a formal analysis, so here is anne akiko meyers's recording of the whole thing.
(for some reason blogger doesn't have a tool for inserting google videos into blogposts, only youtube videos. what?)
i really like this recording, btw, although maybe that's just because of the mounds of student ones i had to wade through to find it. she is a very, very aggressive player sometimes, so i find her climaxes fantastic, especially the one in her first movement. but i guess sometimes she doesn't quite achieve the lightness that i am searching for, for instance in the second sixteenth-note subject in the first movement.
here also is the first movement of gil shaham's, which i have to say is probably one of the only recordings he does that i genuinely like.
most of shaham's stuff leaves me sort of unfulfilled, and maybe his last movement of this concerto also falls into that category. but it's a very sweet recording of a very sweet and pretty simple concerto.
most discussions of this work just point out that this is generally a great example of the sort of "popularism" that was emblematic of these couple decades in American classical composition - the same sort that copland, weill, and a lot of others engaged in during this time. gibson is pretty much correct when he says that it was idiotic of the violinist to reject the concerto, which "just about screams, 'i am going to be one of the most popular violin concertos in history, and i will make your career.' " with like a thousand student recordings of it on youtube, who can really argue? it's no wonder that the songful nature of the first movement have made it a favorite among violinists. with listeners, though, it's actually probably the last movement which really impresses. brief though it is, it's the only really virtuosic thing of the concerto, and i once attended a concert in which the audience probably would not have given more than two ovations if not for the finale (you could feel the dampness in the air after the second movement...)
it's a good leadin to the discussion of popularism during this period of america's compositional history but i'm not really in the mood, so i'll just say that it is so accessible in its structure and yet very sophisticated in its harmonies (uniquely barber - lots of major seconds imposed on fifths and the like), that it's hard to "feel bad" about liking it. i think the fact that it's such a favorite among violinists is very telling.
i will also mention that the second movement is actually by far my favorite. get a load of the augmented tenths. also the oboe solo at the beginning (brahms anyone?)
it's actually a little hard to see how the piece hangs together. the melodies are so clear, so simplistic, it's a bit hard to see how anything in the first movement is reflected in the latter two movements. but as i was working on this piece a few years back i held onto exactly one moment in each movement that seemed to tie the movements together - near the end of each movement (in the cadenza section for the first and second movement, and somewhere in the second half of the third, though i may just be dreaming about this one and it is probably a coincidence) there is an attention-getting two-octave thing.
anyway it's a great bit of fun to play. i can blabber about it for a while, but i'd rather just go listen to the second movement, bye!
