Thursday, February 26 2004

UTSA Recital Hall, 1604 Campus

7:30 pm   FREE and open to all

New Music Series Concert

music you can’t hear anywhere else

 

Click Here to Read a Review of This Concert

 

With a special free pre-concert discussion about Stephen Albert’s To Wake the Dead on words by James Joyce. Find out what the text of these songs are all about (you can read them below).

Come early at 6:30pm and explore

Stephen Albert’s To Wake the Dead and James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake

moderated by UTSA professors Dr. Catherine Kasper (English) and Dr. David Heuser (music).

 

 

Olly Wilson (b. 1937): Sometimes (1976) 17’30”

(for tenor and tape)

Michael Burgess, tenor

 

 

 

 

Dimitri Shostakovich (1906-1975): Sonata for Viola and Piano, Op. 147 (1975) 30’

Allyson Dawkins, viola; Christine Debus, piano

 

I. Moderato

II. Allegretto

III. Adagio

 

 

 

Stephen Albert (1941-1992): To Wake the Dead (1978) 28’

Diana Allan, soprano

Rita Linard, flute (picc/alto flute)

Larry Mentzer, clarinet

Carlos Esparza, bass clarinet

Mary Ellen Goree, violin/viola

Andrea Yun, cello

Sandra Ramawy, piano

Kevin Richmond, piano assistant, harmonium

David Heuser, conductor

 

1. How it ends

2. Riverrun (ballad of Perse O'Reilly)

3. Pray your prayers

4. Instruments (Voice Tacet)
5. Forget, Remember

6. Sod's brood, Mr. Finn

7. Passing Out

 

 

 

Program Notes:

 

The three works on tonight’s concert are all emotionally rich pieces. They are tonal, in the large sense of the word. These are works which are intended to connect with an audience in clear and powerful ways. All of these trends are common to much of the music written in the 1970s, at least in the United States, where many composers felt a new freedom as they rejected the cerebral serial music pushed in most academic circles for much of the 1950s and 60s. Of course, like all historical summaries one sentence long, this is a gross oversimplification. And Shostakovich, here at the end of his life, cannot “return” to tonality as he never left it in the first place. But it is still interesting that these three pieces, written by three very different composers in quite different stages of their careers all have this concern in common. These are works which will touch you and move you, with melodies which will stay with you all the way down the hill and beyond.

-David Heuser

 

 

 

Olly Wilson's richly varied musical background includes not only the traditional composition and academic disciplines, but also his professional experience as a jazz and orchestral musician, and studies of African music in West Africa itself. His catalogue includes orchestral and chamber works, as well as works for electronic media. Born in 1937, the St. Louis, MO, native completed his undergraduate training at Washington University (St. Louis), continuing with his masters studies at University of Illinois (returning later to study electronic music in the Studio for Experimental Music), and received his Ph.D from the University of Iowa. His composition teachers included Robert Wykes, Robert Kelley, and Phillip Bezanson.  His work as a professional musician and held a number of teaching positions before coming to the University of California at Berkeley in 1970. He is now Professor Emeritus there. Wilson's works have been performed by major American orchestras such as the Atlanta, Baltimore, Saint Louis, Detroit, and Dallas Symphonies, along with such international ensembles as the Moscow Philharmonic, the Netherlands Philharmonic and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. He has received commissions from the Boston, Chicago, and Houston Symphonies, as well as the New York Philharmonic and the American Composers Orchestra. He has been awarded numerous honors including: the Dartmouth Arts Council Prize; commissions from the NEA and Koussevitzky Foundation; an artist residency at the American Academy of Rome; several Guggenheim Fellowships; a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship; and the Elise Stoeger Prized awarded by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. In addition to being a published author (Wilson has written numerous articles on African and African-American music), He often conducts concerts of contemporary music. In 1995, Wilson was elected in membership at the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

 

Olly Wilson writes about Sometimes: “[This piece] was composed especially for William Brown, and is based on a contemporary interpretation of the Black spiritual 'Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.' I attempted to recreate within my own musical language not only the profound expression of human hopelessness and desolation that characterizes the traditional spiritual, but also simultaneously on another level, a reaction to that desolation that transcends hopelessness. It is for this reason that musical events associated with the original spiritual appear in a number of different ways: sometimes straightforwardly, sometimes fragmentized or extended, and sometimes in completely new relationships with one another, both on the immediate as well as the large-scale, formal, level. The relationship between the tenor soloist and the electronic tape also reflects a multitude of shifting roles. They frequently exchange solo and complementary functions in varying degrees at different times in the course of the piece. Sometimes is dedicated to my parents who, through love and patience, taught me how to sing.”

 

Sometimes (traditional)

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child

A long way from home

Who’ll believe me

A long way from home.

 

Michael, who too suddenly became a "motherless child" on February 3, 2002, would like to dedicate this performance to the memory his mother on the 1st anniversary of her passing.  She was by far and will always be his number one fan

 

 

The Sonata for Viola and Piano was Dimitri Shostakovich’s final work, and signs indicate he was aware of that at the time he was composing it. He was hospitalized while working on the piece, and wrote in one his last letters, “I have some difficulties with my heart and lungs. I find it difficult to write with my right hand. It was very hard, but I completed the Sonata for Viola and Piano.” He died only three days after the manuscript was delivered to his publisher. The first movement was described by Shostakovich as a “short story.” The middle movement, a scherzo, quotes directly from Shostakovich’s abandoned opera The Gamblers from thirty years before, suggesting, perhaps, a look backwards at his younger self. But it is the third movement which bears most of the weight of this awareness of mortality. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata infiltrates the last movement to such an extent it is hard to hear exactly where Shostakovich ends and Beethoven begins. In his notes for the work, Steve Lake notes that claims have been made to host of other musical allusions: Shostakovich’s 9th Symphony, Tchaikovsky’s 4th, Beethoven’s 5th and his Piano Sonata Op. 100, Mahler, Brahms, Stravinsky, and the possibility that the opening of the piece alludes to Berg’s Violin Concerto, another work concerned with “death and celestial ascent.” Shostakovich seems to be paying homage to his influences here, giving one last nod to them as he goes off stage. But true to so much of his music, Shostakovich is not writing sentimental notes about good-byes; there are qualities of fate, even defiance, but mostly resignation in the music. Perhaps Kim Kashkashian said it the best when she called the third movement “the what-happens-after-death movement.”

 

 

Stephen Albert, who died tragically in December of 1992 when he was hit by a car in New York City, where he had been born 51 years earlier. He first studied composition at the age of 15 with Elie Siegmeister, and enrolled two years later at the Eastman School of Music, where he studied with Bernard Rogers. Following composition lessons in Stockholm with Karl-Birger Blomdahl, Albert studied with Joseph Castaldo at the Philadelphia Musical Academy, and in 1963 he worked with George Rochberg at the University of Pennsylvania. He won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his symphony RiverRun, and from 1985 to 1988 served as composer-in-residence with the Seattle Symphony, after which, until the time his death, he was professor of composition at the Juilliard School of Music. He received commissions from the Chicago, National, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Seattle symphonies, The Philadelphia Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and the Library of Congress, and he was much awarded and honored (including two Rome Prizes). He had also taught in the Lima, Ohio public schools (under a Ford Foundation grant as composer-in-residence).

 

The works of James Joyce provided Albert with a potent creative stimulus; Finnegan's Wake and Ulysses served as springboards for his symphony RiverRun, vocal works To Wake the Dead, TreeStone, Flower of the Mountain, and Sun's Heat. His last works included the Cello Concerto, commissioned by the Baltimore Symphony for Yo-Yo Ma (and recorded by them on the Sony Classical label) and Wind Canticle, a clarinet concerto for David Shifrin and The Philadelphia Orchestra. Symphony No. 2 for the New York Philharmonic, completed in short score at the time of his death, received its premiere in November 1994. Albert’s music is contemporary in sound, yet firmly rooted in traditional compositional techniques, drawing inspiration from the rich emotional palette of 19th-century music, while remaining thoroughly modern.

 

To Wake the Dead, a cycle of six songs and one instrumental interlude, was composed 1977-1978, and marked the beginning of Albert's response to James Joyce’s literary stimulus, using text from Finnegans Wake. However, it is surprising to have Albert tell us the A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was the only work of Joyce's he had read in its entirety when he composed most of these works. "I didn't really read Finnegans Wake from beginning to end," he says; "I used it more or less as a reference work, the way other composers might use the Bible, finding certain passages in it that lend to musical treatment of a direct sort, such as actual song settings, or a more indirect sort, such as my symphony. The symphony in not really a programmatic work in the accepted sense: it represents my response to a Joycean stimulus, but that response is not the type that involves an attempt at direct imagery." Albert is attracted, he says, to "the very musical rhythm of Joyce's language; among 20th-century poets, only T.S. Eliot and perhaps Yeats strike me as being more musical in that respect. The flashes of imagery are marvelous, and there is that convoluted nostalgia -- for under all his artful disguises and arcane language one finds a basic Irish sentiment which I for one like so much. In his work I discovered what I regard as a foreign language -- a language enormously suggestive of English, and of course directly related to English, but essentially a foreign language. Through this invented language he has been able to elusively chronicle man's endurance of tragedy and the whole human comedy . . . Finnegans Wake does not produce literal or direct images for me, but works in terms of generalized suggestions and impressions. This stimulus produces a sort of mental atmosphere that provides for me an escape from contemporary America -- in much the same way, I suppose, that the theological stimuli to which Bach responded provided him an escape from the realities of early 18th-century Leipzig."

 

A brief summary of Joyce’s themes are found in Joseph Campbell's famous study A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake: “Tim Finnegan of the old vaudeville song is an Irish sod carrier who gets drunk, falls off a ladder, and is apparently killed. His friends hold a death watch over his coffin; during the festivities someone splashes him with whiskey, at which Finnegan comes to life again and joins the general dance . . Finnegan's fall from the ladder is Lucifer's fall, Adam's fall, the setting sun that will rise again, the fall of Rome, a Wall Street crash . . . It is Humpty Dumpty's fall and the fall of Newton's apple. And it is every man's daily recurring fall from grace . . . By Finn's coming again (Finn-again) -- in other words, by the reappearance of the hero -- . . . Strength and hope are provided for mankind.”

 



1. How it ends

Oaks of ald lie in peat
Elms leap where askes lay
Phall if you will, rise you must
In the nite and at the fading

What has gone,
How it ends,
Today's truth
Tomorrow's trend.

Forget remember
The fading of the stars
Forget . . . Begin to forget it.

2. Riverrun (ballad of Perse O'Reilly)

Have you heard of one Humpty Dumpty
How he fell with a roll and rumble
And curled up like Lord Olafa Crumple
By the butt of the Magazine Wall
Of the Magazine Wall
Hump helmet and all

He was once our king of the castle
Now he's knocked about like a rotten old parsnip
And from Green Street he'll be sent
By the order of his worship
To the penal jail of Mount Joy
Jail him and Joy.

Have you heard the one Humpty Dumpty
How he . . .

-- Riverrun, riverrun
Past Eve and Adam's
From swerve of shore to
Bend of bay --

. . . How he fell with a roll and a rumble
And not all the kings's men nor his horses
Will resurrect his corpus
For their's no true spell in Connacht or Hell
That's able to raise a Cain.

-- Riverrun, riverrun --

3. Pray your prayers

Loud hear us
Loud graciously hear us
O Loud hear the wee beseech of thees
We beseech of these of each of thy unlitten ones
Grant sleep

That they take no chill
That they ming no merder, no chill
Grant sleep in hour's time

Loud heap miseries upon us
Yet entwine our arts entwine our arts with laughter low.

Loud hear us
Hear the we beseech of these.

Say your prayers Timothy.

 

4. Instruments (Voice Tacet)

 

5. Forget, Remember

Rush, my only into your arms
So soft this morning ours
Carry me along
I rush my only into your arms.

What has gone
How it ends
Today's truth
Tomorrow's trend.

Forget
Remember.

 

6. Sod's brood, Mr. Finn

What clashes here of wills
Sod's brood be me fear
Arms apeal
With larms appalling
Killy Kill Killy a-toll a-toll.
What clashes here of wills
Sod's brood

He points the death bone . . .

Of their fear they broke
They ate wind
They fled
Of their fear they broke
Where they ate there they fled
Of their fear they fled
They broke away.

O my shining stars and body.

Hold to now
Win out ye devil, ye.

. . . And the quick are still
He lifts the life wand
And the dumb speak.

Ho Ho Ho Ho Mister Finn
You're goin' to be Mr. Finnagain
Come day morn and O your vine
Send-days eve and ah, your vinegar.
Ha Ha Ha Ha Mister Fun
Your goin' to fined again.

 

7. Passing Out

Loonely in me loonelyness
For all thei faults I am passing out,
O bitter ending.
I'll slip away before they're up
They'll never see nor know nor miss me.

And it's old, it's sad and weary
I'll go back to you
My cold father
My cold mad feary father
Back to you.

I rush only into your arms.
So soft this morning ours
Yes
Carry me along
Taddy
Like you done through the toy fair
Taddy
The toy fair
Taddy

First we pass through grass
behush the bush to.
To whish a gull
Gulls
Far far crys
Coming far
End here
Us then Finnagain
Take, bussoftlhe memormee
Till thou sends the
Away alone
a last a loved
along the