Brightmusic Chamber Ensemble

Concert 1 program notes

The Jeannette Sias Memorial Concert

Joan Tower, Petroushskates:  Joan Tower (b. 1938) is “one of the most prominent American composers from the latter part of the 20^th Century” [Robert Cummings].  She’s still composing today.  After experimenting with serial techniques, she turned to a more “approachable style with graspable melodies and strong, powerful rhythms” [Cummings].  She has served as a member of the music faculty at Bard College since 1972.  Her works “have awed audiences with a towering sense of simplicity, whose luminescence reveals a wealth of sub-surface details” [Seth Brodsky].  Petroushskates, composed in 1980, combines two very different inspirations: the music of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet score Petroushka and the visual imagery of figure skating.  Music critic James M. Keller calls this work “sparkling,” “shimmering” and “relentlessly energetic.”

Or Kribos, Man of Valor for String Quartet:  Man of Valor received its premiere performance on October 30, 2014 when the Oklahoma Israeli Exchange (OKIE) presented its Light, Leadership and Legacy Award to Richard L. Sias and the late Jeannette Jouillian Sias, who passed away on April 15, 2014.  The work unfolds as such: Prelude and Fugue, Adagio, Dance and Postlude.  The composer’s own notes about this work are attached.  Or Kribos was born in Jerusalem and grew up near the Mediterranean Sea in Qiryat Bialik, Israel.  He is currently a graduate student in music composition at Oklahoma City University and studies with Dr. Edward Knight.  He divides his musical activity between world-wide commercial venues and the concert stage.  He is currently producing and composing two albums commissioned by Warner/Chappell Production Music. 

Kris Maloy, “Float” and “Slink” from Quartet in Four Actions:  Kris Maloy is an eclectic composer of many interests and influences, who writes music bridging many styles and genres.  He has taught composition, jazz, saxophone, piano and music theory at Oklahoma City University, the University of Central Oklahoma and UCO’s Academy of Contemporary Music, among other universities.  Brightmusic commissioned Quartet in Four Actions and gave its world premiere in January 2008.  A Carnegie Hall premiere followed in 2010 by the chamber ensemble enhakē.  Brightmusic has premiered two other works of Dr. Maloy: Flourish in April 2010 (commissioned by Artistic Directors Chad Burrow and Amy Cheng) and Overture to the Great American Songbook (commissioned by Brightmusic for its 2010-11 season finale, “Americana”).  “Float” and “Slink” are the second and third movements of Quartet in Four Actions.  For more information about Dr. Maloy, see krismaloy.com.        

John Williams, Air and Simple Gifts:  John Williams (b. 1932) is “the most recognized composer in film history” [Patsy Morita].  He is also a gifted pianist (a studio pianist for Henry Mancini in the 1960’s) and conductor (the principal conductor of the Boston Pops from 1982-93).  After his education at The Juilliard School and the Eastman School of Music, he worked primarily as an orchestrator and arranger.  In the 1970’s, he found his fame in film scores – Jaws  for Steven Spielberg, Star Wars for George Lucas and Superman for Richard Donner.  There followed not only scores for action films but also very different music required by films such as ET, Schindler’s List and Lincoln.  He has earned 29 Academy Award nominations, five Oscars and 22 Grammies.  His prolific output includes concert works – symphonies, concertos and chamber music.  He composed Air and Simple Gifts for the January 2009 inauguration of President Obama – the first classical quartet ever performed at a Presidential inauguration.  It is based on the 19^th Century Shaker hymn, “Simple Gifts” by Joseph Brackett, the same theme used by Aaron Copland in Appalachian Spring.

Samuel Barber, “Adagio for Strings” (Movement 2, Molto Adagio, from String Quartet, op. 11):  Samuel Barber (1910-81) was a major figure in the home-grown American musical genius that flourished in the 20^th Century, “the golden boy of American music,” according to David Dubal.  He trained at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and won two Pulitzer Prizes.  His music “is deeply felt, never secondhand” [Wilfrid Mellers].  Adagio for Strings is Barber’s best-known work, adapted from the second movement of his 1936 String Quartet.  The Adagio’s radio broadcast in 1938 by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Orchestra instantly made it “an icon of American music, particularly associated with grief-laden situations” [James M. Keller].  It was performed at the funerals of Presidents Roosevelt and Kennedy, and it was a recurring theme of pathos in Oliver Stone’s 1986 film Platoon.  “Whenever the American dream suffers a catastrophic setback, Barber’s Adagio for Strings plays” [Alex Ross].

Michael Torke, “The Yellow Pages” from The Telephone Book:  Michael Torke (b. 1961) studied piano performance and composition at the Eastman School of Music and Yale University.  He has “a penchant for combining classical forms and techniques with ‘popular’ content” [All Music Guide to Classical Music].  His music “can have the fiery glint of early Stravinsky, the opulence of Richard Strauss, or the infectious insistence of rock progression” [Wayne Reisig].  Torke composed The Yellow Pages in 1985 as a composition student at Yale, one of a series of color-themed works he wrote in the 1980’s and 1990’s.  It was performed as a separate composition for about 10 years.  Due to its popularity, Torke made it Movement 1 of a larger work that he entitled The Telephone Book, adding two new movements.  The composer associates particular key signatures with particular colors.  In this case, he said, “the key of G major, around which the piece is based, is the color of yellow, or at least a dark, burnt yellow.”

Lowell Liebermann, Night Music, op. 109:  Lowell Liebermann (b. 1961) has been composing since age 15, when he composed a piano sonata ... which he performed one year later in Carnegie Hall.  He received his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from The Juilliard School.  He is a prolific composer of orchestral, chamber, piano solo, opera and vocal music, with more than 100 published compositions to his credit, many of them commissioned by major orchestras, chamber ensembles and recording artists.  His works appear on more than 60 CDs to date.  In addition to composing, he is an active piano soloist and conductor.  “Night Music” was composed on commission and premiered in 2009 at the National Flute Association Convention in New York City.   

David Schiff, Divertimento from “Gimpel the Fool:”  David Schiff (b. 1945) is a composer and author.  He holds degrees in English literature from Columbia and Cambridge Universities.  He studied music at the Manhattan School of Music and received his DMA from The Juilliard School.  He has composed operas, orchestral music, chamber music and sacred music.  He is the author of books about George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and Elliott Carter.  In addition to scholarly papers, he has written for The New York Times and The Atlantic.  He is a Professor of Music at Reed College in Portland, Oregon and has been intimately involved in Portland-based Chamber Music Northwest, with which Brightmusic partnered in our 2012-13 season to commission a new chamber music work by Christopher Theofanidis.  Dr. Schiff wrote the opera, Gimpel the Fool, in 1975.  It received its premiere performance at the 92^nd Street Y in New York City.  Thereafter, from 1975-1980, he revised the opera and, in 1982, composed the Divertimento.  In his words, “This was the first piece of many written for David Shifrin and Chamber Music Northwest ....  It is also my most popular piece and has been performed just about everywhere ....  The Divertimento is drawn from several numbers in the opera.  The work is set in four movements:  1. Overture/the Rabbi,  2. Wedding Song,  3. Bread Song and  4. Badkhen’s Song/Mazel Tov.

MAN OF VALOR
for String Quartet (2014-15)

Or Kribos

The creation of this new work, Man of Valor, is inspired by the good deedsof Dick Sias and his beloved wife, Jeannette Joullian Sias, of blessed memory.  Across the decades, the Siases bolstered the arts, adding color and vibrance to the great state of Oklahoma.  Their deep devotion to Oklahoma is only eclipsed by their “overflowing” devotion to each other.

The music unfolds as such: Prelude and Fugue, Adagio, Dance and Postlude.  The piece was influenced by Eshet Chayil (Woman of Valor), a traditional melody by Rabbi Zion Ben Shenkar, set to the traditional poem A Woman of Valor from the Book of Proverbs (31:10-31).  This passage is recited every Friday evening, as the Shabbat meal unfolds, by the husband to the wife to honor and praise her for her everyday deeds.

            A woman of valor who can find?  Her worth is far above jewels. 
            The heart of her husband trusts in her, and nothing shall he lack.
            She renders him good and not evil all the days of her life.
            She opens her hand to the needy, and extends her hand to the poor.
            She is robed in strength and dignity, and cheerfully faces whatever may come.
            She opens her mouth with wisdom.  Her tongue is guided by kindness.
            She tends to the affairs of her household, and eats not the bread of idleness.
            Her children come forward and bless her.  Her husband too, and he praises her: 
                  “Many women have done superbly, but you surpass them all.”
            Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a God-fearing woman is much to be praised.
            Place before her the fruit of her hands.  Wherever people gather, her deeds speak her praise.

The passage celebrates the virtues of courage and strength and occasionally, women encourage and celebrate one another by shouting, “eshet chayil!” (Woman of Valor!) after each milestone.

Inspired by the Siases, the music is romantic, vibrant, and engaging, comprised of traditional Jewish motifs.

Let their deeds speak their praise!

Concert 2 program notes

Samuel Barber, Sonata for Cello and Piano, op. 6:  Samuel Barber (1910-81) was a major figure in the home-grown American musical genius that flourished in the 20^th Century, “the golden boy of American music” [David Dubal].  He trained at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and won two Pulitzer Prizes for his compositions.  His music “is deeply felt, never secondhand” [Wilfrid Mellers].  Barber “produced long melodic lines rich orchestral textures, leaving audiences with the feeling that they had consumed a high-protein meal” [Alex Ross].  Barber wrote his cello sonata in 1932, while still a student at Curtis.  He dedicated it to his composition teacher, Rosario Scalero, but the work reflected significant input from cellist Orlando Cole, who premiered the work with Barber in 1933.  Cole later wrote, “It’s very cellistic, very singing....  It takes advantage of the best qualities of the instrument.”  The sonata reflects Barber’s admiration for Brahms, while demonstrating the rhythmic complexity of 20^th Century music.  Until 1948, it was the only cello sonata in the repertoire written by an American composer.  It continues to hold a notable place in the cello repertoire today.  The work is set in three movements:  1.  Allegro ma non troppo,  2. Adagio, and  3. Allegro appassionato. 

Paul Schoenfield, Five Days from the Life of a Manic-Depressive:  Pianist and composer Paul Schoenfield (b. 1947) is the Professor of Composition at the University of Michigan, a faculty colleague of Brightmusic Artistic Directors Chad Burrow and Amy Cheng.  His music spans a wide range of human experience, from the lightness of “Café Music” (which Brightmusic performed in January 2012) to the darkness of his Holocaust memorial work “Sparks of Glory” (which Brightmusic performed in March of this year).  “Echoes of Mozart, Brahms, Bartok and Shostakovich ... impart an infectious zest, and distinctive flavor, to [his] music....  Like the music of Gershwin, to which it has been compared, Schoenfield’s sparkles with wit and energy and draws deeply on the composer’s Jewish roots” [Dennis J. Dooley].  Five Days follows Schoenfield’s imaginary protagonist through the heights and depths of a disorder that has often been associated with artistic creativity in general, and musical creativity in particular (e.g., Robert Schumann).  “The psychology of the music is so penetrating that one is not sure whether to laugh or gape in awe of a mind so warped” [Stephen Smoliar].  The work is set in five movements:  1. Metamorphoses on “I’m Crazy ‘Bout My Baby,”  2. Labyrinth,  3. Elegy,  4. From a Bintel Brief, and  5. Boogie.   

Charles Ives:  Charles Ives (1874-1954) was to American music as E. E. Cummings was to American poetry.  The music of this “first great American national composer” was “so far ahead of its time that it was mutated rather than composed” [Harold Schonberg].  Ives’ father was a New England bandmaster who enjoyed having his children sing hymns in one key, while he accompanied them in another.  Ives studied music composition at Yale but his unorthodox works didn’t endear him to its faculty (he had a D+ average, according to James Keller).  After working as an actuary for several years, he founded an insurance company that became one of the most successful in America.  “His finances were such that he could go on composing whether people were interested in his work or not” [Keller].  Ives was an “uncompromising genius decades ahead of his time” who composed music that has finally come into its own” [Schonberg].  He was “a true innovator, and the first American composer to venture into uncharted regions of sound” [David Dubal].  During his lifetime, he was largely unknown to the public, and even to most musicians.  He received a Pulitzer Prize for his Third Symphony in 1947 – 43 years after he composed it.  After his death, his music was championed by Leopold Stokowski and Leonard Bernstein, among others.  According to Schonberg, Ives music is “a constant reflection of his New England youth: remembrances of life in a simpler age.”       

Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano:  Ives composed this sonata in 1914-17, “based, to a large extent, on the old ragtime stuff,” according to Ives, including some works he had written as early as 1901.  After Ives revised it in 1919, the sonata received its premiere at Aeolian Hall in New York City in 1924.  Its  “vivid and nostalgic” style has made it one of Ives’ most frequently recorded chamber works [Scott Mortensen] – most recently, in a 2012 release by Hilary Hahn and Valentina Lisitsa, along with Ives’ other three violin sonatas.  The work is set in three movements:  1. Autumn: Adagio maestoso – Allegro moderato,  2. In the Barn: Presto – Allegro moderato, and  3. The Revival: Largo – Allegretto.  Each movement reflects Ives’ propensity for quoting American folk tunes, other composers and sometimes himself.    

Largo for Violin, Clarinet and Piano:  The etymology of this work is uncertain.  It may have begun as a work for violin and organ.  By 1901, it had become a work for violin and piano.  Sometime in 1901-02, Ives scored it for violin, clarinet and piano.  Its final version includes revisions that the composer made in 1934.  The work “is decidedly progressive in the single long arch of its formal conception, which begins and ends quietly with just the violin playing an expressive and wide-ranging melody over a gentle, ostinato piano accompaniment, but rises to considerable expressive vigor in its central regions after the entry of the clarinet” [Richard E. Rodda].  It is, like its composer, “flinty and rough-hewn and uncompromising” – “a miniature masterwork” [Rodda].

George Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue:  In George Gershwin (1898-1937), classical music met the  Jazz Age.  George and his brother Ira were sons of Russian Jews who immigrated to the United States in the 1890s.  In 1910 his parents purchased a piano, intended for Ira, but soon appropriated by George.  He began to study classical music at age 12.  At age 16, he opted for Tin Pan Alley, dropping out of high school to write songs for the music publisher Jerome Remick.  His first hit song, “Swanee,” was recorded by Al Jolson in 1920.  With Ira as his lyricist, he wrote music for Broadway and London.  “I Got Rhythm,” “Embraceable You,” “The Man I Love,” “’S Wonderful” and “Someone to Watch Over Me” remain permanent fixtures of American song.  In 1923 American band leader Paul Whiteman asked Gershwin to compose a “jazz concerto” for piano and orchestra.  The work’s motif began “during a train trip to Boston.  [Gershwin] kept listening to the throb of the train’s hypnotic rhythm, and the seed of Rhapsody in Blue was planted” [David Dubal].  Only when Ira reminded George that the Whiteman commission was already scheduled for public performance, did George put pen to paper.  In a burst of creativity, Gershwin composed the Rhapsody between January 7 and February 4, 1924.  Quickly orchestrated by Ferde Grofé, Whiteman’s band (plus strings) gave the premiere performance on February 12, 1924, with Gershwin at the keyboard, and with Stokowski, Heifetz, Kreisler and Rachmaninoff  in the audience.  “When the last chord sounded, delirium ensued” [Alex Ross].  Music critics, including The New York Times and the New York Tribune, were less enthusiastic.  Gershwin followed the Rhapsody with his Concerto in F in 1925; Three Preludes for Piano in 1926; An American in Paris in 1928; and Porgy and Bess in 1935.  “No American composer had ever gained such international notice” [Ross].  Still, Gershwin was a “nice Jewish kid ... as comfortable with applause on Broadway as at Carnegie Hall, and as comfortable with blacks in Harlem and Charleston as with the swank movie community of Hollywood” [Dubal].  On July 11, 1937, at the height of his fame, he died of a brain tumor.  His friend Oscar Levant said, “Up until the six months preceding [his] death, life for him was just one big, wild, marvelous dream come true.”  Only in America, could “an artist with Gershwin’s magic touch ... be cherished equally for his serious and his popular work.  Gershwin remains America’s best-loved composer” [Dubal].

Concert 3 program notes

Edward Knight, Sea of Grass, Ocean of Sky:  Edward Knight (b. 1961) is a former Oklahoma Musician of the Year and winner of Oklahoma City University’s 2013 Outstanding Faculty Award, the University’s highest teaching honor.  His works range from Cradle of Dreams, a choral and orchestral composition for a 100-piece orchestra and 250 voices, to two full-length musicals and award-winning song cycles.  Brightmusic is proud to have presented several of Dr. Knight’s chamber music works, including Beneath a Cinnamon Moon (commissioned by Brightmusic for the 2007 Oklahoma Centennial), Curve of Gold (also commissioned by Brightmusic), INBOX and Raven (which we performed at our April 2014 concert).  The composer’s own notes about Sea of Grass, Ocean of Sky are attached.  This afternoon’s performance is offered by the three musicians who commissioned and have recently recorded this work – clarinetist Chad Burrow, violinist Sean Wang and pianist Amy I-Lin Cheng, who constitute the ensemble Trio Solari.  For more information about Trio Solari, see pmiarts.com/index_files/TrioSolari.htm.  For more information about Dr. Knight, see edwardknight.com.  Dr. Knight serves as a member of the Board of Directors of Brightmusic.

Peter Schickele (aka P.D.Q. Bach), Serenade for Three:  Peter Schickele (b. 1955) has multiple musical personalities.  He is best known as Professor Schickele, the “discoverer” of P.D.Q. Bach – the fictional last and least of Johann Sebastian Bach’s children.  Schickele is also a composer in his own right (of more than 200 songs, chamber works, film scores and TV themes), a music arranger (for Joan Baez, among other folk singers), a teacher (at Juilliard and elsewhere) and the host of an award-winning radio show.  “Despite Professor Schickele’s pronouncements that P.D.Q. Bach was both ignorant and lazy, writing original music only when he couldn’t remember what he was trying to steal or was so incompetent in his plagiarism that he ended up creating something new,” Schickele’s compositions “are carefully crafted to appeal both to audiences with a thorough understanding of or only a very passing and casual acquaintance with classical music” [Ann Feeney].  He composed Serenade for Three in 1973 and set the work in three movements:  1. Dances: Joyful, boisterous,  2. Songs: Slow, serene, and  3. Variations: Fast, rowdy.  Movement 3’s variations are allegedly based on a tune from P.D.Q. Bach’s opera, “Oedipus Tex.”  The Professor describes this movement as “cornball cowboy music.”

Ned Rorem, Winter Pages:  Ned Rorem (b. 1923) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer of hundreds of art songs, as well as chamber music, symphonies, concertos, operas, ballets, theatrical works and works for individual instruments, including piano and organ.  Rorem thinks as a vocal composer.  Even his instrumental works have an implicit vocal quality to them.  He studied at Northwestern University and the Curtis Institute of Music, before receiving his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from The Juilliard School.  Among his teachers were Virgil Thomson, Aaron Copland and Arthur Honegger.  Although Rorem has done some teaching, he has devoted most of his career to composing and writing.  (Among his chamber works is Bright Music, a quintet which Brightmusic performed at its first concert in November 2003.)  Rorem wrote Winter Pages in 1981.  The work is set in twelve movements:  1. A Mirror, 2. “The sun that brief December day...,” 3. “Around the house the flakes fly faster...,” 4. Paris then, 5. Dorchester Avenue, 6. Hesitations, 7. “...urged by earnest violins...,” 8. “...moments fly by like a snowstorm...,” 9. Rue des Saints-Peres, 10. Valse Oubliee, 11. Stone Snowballs and 12. Still Life.  The composer’s own notes about Winter Pages are set forth on the reverse side of this program insert.

SEA OF GRASS, OCEAN OF SKY  (2014)

Edward Knight

Sea of Grass, Ocean of Skywas commissioned from composer Edward Knight by Trio Solari, which requested an expansive, lyrical work with strong American roots.  The new work is inspired by a sense of wonder of the sweeping views of the open prairie and unbroken horizon of the Great Plains.  The music chronicles letters written by a settler in Oklahoma Territory as he attempts to woo and win a would-be wife living back east.  

In the opening movement, Dear Violet, the man tells of his day-to-day adventures, describing the beauty of a prairie thick with birdsong, and implores her to write back.

In the second movement, Dearest and True Violet, the newly encouraged correspondent waxes poetic over the people and places he encounters, and describes the little luxuries he finds while visiting other pioneers.  Each of the instruments takes a virtuosic turn rhapsodizing about the territory and its possibilities. 

In the final movement, My Dearest Love, he rejoices in her acceptance of his proposal and begins recounting the details of what must be done before their wedding.  He soon stops short, interrupting his practical to-dos with a declaration of his joy as he and his beloved are about to undertake a life together amid a sea of grass, ocean of sky.

Ned Rorem – Composer Notes about Winter Pages

During the first cold weeks of 1981 I began writing the quintet in New York, completing it in Nantucket in late May.  The suite of twelve pieces is a diary of the season, each entry leading to the next, reworking the same concerns which nevertheless shift their mood according to the weather.  The whole represents a plateau from where, as the future grows narrower, the past seems more widely open to reinterpretation. Today I dwell autumnally —winterishly, even—upon my teen years in Chicago, where I wrote my first songs on American poetry, and upon my twenties in France where I continued to write songs on American poetry.  This “dwelling” forms the core of Winter Pages.

My nonvocal works are songs without texts.  Indeed, so firmly do I rely on the poor singer within me longing to get out that the music feels almost like verse without words.  Yet, since nonvocal music can never contain a uniformly identifiable program (music is not literature), I often, like many another “impressionist,” take pains to suggest images through titles.  A musical rose by any other name smells differently.

A Mirror is so named because the material backtracks at midpoint and rewinds itself in reverse.  This very short curtain raiser plants the seeds for most of the succeeding sections.  Whittier's Snowbound provides the canvas for the second movement on which the solo bassoon paints the scene: “The sun that brief December day/ Rose cheerless over hills of gray,/And, darkly circled, gave at noon/A sadder light than waning moon.”

Three players—clarinet, violin, cello—evoke the opening lines of Hardy's Birds At Winter Nightfall: “Around the house the flakes fly faster/ And all the berries now are gone....” Paris then is a waltz for clarinet and piano.

The fifth section revives Dorchester Avenue, near Chicago's 57th Street, which was home for me between the crucial ages of seven and seventeen, and where I learned the piano. Hesitations, the title for a trio of strings and piano, is made clear in the music, which jerks and pauses.

The long central seventh movement is a rondo for solo violin, supported and contradicted by the others.  The title comes from Wilfred Owen's Music: “I have been urged by earnest violins/ And drunk their mellow sorrows to the slake/ Of all my sorrows and my thirsting sins./ My heart has beaten for a brave drum's sake.”

Paul Goodman, the source for so many of my songs and an irreversible influence on my youth, closed his play Stoplight with these words:“...nothing to do but wait,/ meantime the moments fly by like a snowstorm/ and my time is slipping away.” These verses are illustrated by clarinet, bassoon, and piano, all skittering.  The tenth movement paints the Rue des Saints-Pères, on which loomed one of the many hotels I once called home at five every morning....

Valse Oubilée, of course, is a title from Liszt.  Jean Cocteau, in his movie Blood of a Poet, incorporates the following stanza: Ainsi partent souvent du college Ces coups de poing faisant cracher du sang,/ Ces coups de poing durs des boules de neige/ Que donnent la beauté vite en passant.

I had already finished the penultimate soliloquy and called it Cello Alone, when I realized that Cocteau's phrase had worked its way into my subconscious and impelled the composition. The cello then gathers the sounds from the preceding sections, weaves them together, and drifts—into a Still Life, wherein the five instrumentalists sing together in a quiet, formal ending. — NED ROREM

Concert 4 program notes

John Harbison, November 19, 1828:  John Harbison (b. 1938) studied composition with Walter Piston and Roger Sessions.  He has been a professor of music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for many years.  His prolific compositions include symphonies, operas, concertos, numerous chamber music works, a ballet, solo vocal works and many choral works.  He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for his cantata The Flight into Egypt.  Harbison’s artistic credo is “to make each piece different from the others, to find clear, fresh large designs, to reinvent traditions.”  This work is a tribute to Franz Schubert, who died on November 19, 1828.  About a week before his death, Schubert took a counterpoint lesson from the Austrian music theorist, Simon Sechter but he never completed the assignment that Sechter gave him.  The composer’s notes about this work are set forth on the reverse side of this program insert.

William Grant Still, Miniatures for Flute, Oboe and Piano:  In William Grant Still (1895-1978), “a black composer finally found a place of respect in classical America” [Alex Ross].  Sometimes referred to as “The Dean of African-American Composers,” Still grew up in a family that encouraged his interest in music.  He studied music at Wilberforce University, the Oberlin Conservatory and the New England Conservatory.  He “moved back and forth between classical activities and a day job at Black Swan Records” [Ross].  He arranged music for Paul Whiteman and W. C. Handy, and he composed incidental music for radio, film and television, including “Perry Mason” and “Gunsmoke.”  His classical output included four symphonies, nine operas, several ballets and many songs.  He was the first African-American to conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, and to have his works performed by major American orchestras and opera companies.  Still composed his five Miniatures in Los Angeles in 1948:  1. Ride and Old Paint, 2. Adolorido Mexico, 3. Jesus Is a Rock in the Weary Land, 4. Yaravi Peru, and 5. A Frog Went A-Courtin’.

John Corigliano, “Red Violin” Caprices for Solo Violin:  John Corigliano (b. 1938) has a passion for communication with his audience, which has made him one of today’s “serious” composers who appeals to an unusually wide base.  He received his formal education at Columbia University and the Manhattan School of Music.  His compositions, generally symphonic, utilize “a musical language in which architecture, color, and overt drama are paramount” [Jeremy Grimshaw].  In 1981, he received an Oscar nomination for his film score for Ken Russell’s “Altered States.”  In 1999, he received an Oscar for his film score for François Giraud’s “The Red Violin.”  That score, in the composer’s words, “needed to be tied together with a single musical idea. For this purpose I used the Baroque device of a chaconne:  a repeated pattern of chords upon which the music is built.”  Composed for violinist Joshua Bell, Corigliano’s Caprices “take a spacious, troubadour-inspired theme and vary it both linearly and stylistically. These variations intentionally evoke Baroque, Gypsy, and arch-Romantic idioms as they examine the same materials (a dark, seven-chord chaconne as well as that principal theme) from differing aural viewpoints. The Caprices were created and ordered to reflect the structure of the film.” 

David Maslanka, Wind Quintet No. 3:  David Maslanka (b.1943) studied at Oberlin College Conservatory of Music and Michigan State University.  After serving on several music faculties, he has been a freelance composer since 1990.  He has composed in many genres – symphonies, concertos, choral works and a complete Mass – but he is best known for his music for band and wind ensemble.  He has received grants from several prestigious organizations, including ASCAP and the National Symphony Orchestra, and has served as a guest composer for more than 100 universities, music festivals and conferences.  Maslanka’s compositional style is complex and rhythmically intense.  But he believes that “music is one of the expressions of soul,” and his unconscious spiritual inspiration gives his music a warm, gentle quality.  His third wind quintet is set in three movements:  I. Slow – Moderate, II. Moderate, and III. Very Fast.  Maslanka’s works contain strong spiritual overtones, often with quotes from Bach Chorales.  Movement I of this work quotes “Ihr Gestirn, ihr hohen Lüfte,” BWV 366 and “Christ der du bist Tag und Licht,” BWV 1096, while Movement II quotes “Ermunte dich, mein scwacher Geist,” BWV 248.

Kazimierz Machala, American Folk Suite for Chamber Ensemble:  Kazimierz Machala (b.1948) was born in Poland, studied horn in the Czech Republic, and was the first hornist to receive a DMA from The Juilliard School.  He taught at the University of Georgia from 1986-89 and at the University of Illinois from 1989-2009, where he remains Professor Emeritus of Horn.  Today, “Kaz,” as everybody calls him, is back in Poland teaching horn at the Chopin University in Warsaw.  His American Folk Suite is a delightful romp ... a “playful and light-hearted piece” ... and a fitting benediction for Brightmusic’s presentation of “America, the Beautiful.”

John Harbison – Composer Notes about November 19, 1828

The "medium" for this tombeau for Schubert is grateful for the generosity of Jim and Marina Harrison, at whose home near Genova the piece was realized.  Their library contained a book by Alfred Mann, Theory and Practice, in which an account of Schubert's lesson with Sechter, and the lesson itself, appear.  The piece asserts Schubert's relevance to our present rather than any nostalgia for the past.

I.  Introduction: Schubert crosses into the next world
II.  Suite: Schubert finds himself in a hall of mirrors

1. Theme
2. Écossaise
3. Moment Musicale
4. Impromptu
5. Valse

III.  Rondo: Schubert recalls a rondo fragment from 1816
IV.  Fugue: Schubert continues the fugue subject (S-C-H-U-B-E-R-T) that Sechter assigned him

I.  The trumpets of death are heard three times.  Schubert begins his journey haunted by sounds which are not his music, but pertain to his music in disturbing ways.

II.  In the hall of mirrors music sounds in a manner previously unknown to Schubert — everything is played back immediately upside down.

III.  Emblematic of a storehouse of ideas which are still to be explored, perhaps even in future times, the short fragment which begins this Rondo is the only one in this piece composed by Schubert in his first life.

IV.  Shortly before his death, Schubert went to the theorist Sechter to work on a very specific problem pertaining to the tonal answer of the fugue subject, important to Schubert in the composition of his masses.  Sechter, well aware that he was teaching the most extraordinary student who ever came for a lesson, concluded by assigning Schubert a fugue subject on his own name.  Schubert was unable to undertake the task; he died about a week later, on November 19, 1828.

November 19, 1828 is a National Endowment for the Arts Consortium Commission, composed for the Atlanta Chamber Players, the Da Capo Chamber Players, and Voices of Change.

—John Harbison