Missy Mazzoli (b. 1980) Still Life with Avalanche (2008)

Missy Mazzoli, born in Pennsylvania, was recently deemed "one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York" by the New York Times, and "Brooklyn's post-millennial Mozart" by Time Out New York.  Her music has been performed all over the world by the Kronos Quartet, eighth blackbird, the Minnesota Orchestra, the American Composers Orchestra, New York City Opera, the South Carolina Philharmonic, NOW Ensemble and many others.  Upcoming projects include the premiere of her chamber opera, Song from the Uproar, at New York City venue The Kitchen, and a new orchestral work for the League of Composers Chamber Orchestra.  She is the recipient of four ASCAP Young Composer Awards, a Fulbright Grant, and grants from the Jerome Foundation and the Barlow Endowment. In 2006 Missy taught beginning composition at Yale University, and is now Executive Director of the MATA Festival in New York City.  Missy is also an active pianist, and often performs with Victoire, an "all-star, all-female quintet" (Time Out New York) she founded in 2008 dedicated exclusively to her own compositions.  Victoire will release Cathedral City, an album including eight new works by Mazzoli, in September 2010 on New Amsterdam Records.  Missy attended the Yale School of Music (M.M. 2006), the Royal Conservatory of the Hague (post-graduate studies 2002-2004) and Boston University (B.M. 2002).  Her principal teachers were Louis Andriessen, Martijn Padding, Richard Ayres, David Lang, Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis, Charles Fussell, Richard Cornell, Martin Amlin and John Harbison.

Recent projects included the premiere of Sound of the Light, a new work commissioned by Carnegie Hall and two performances of These Worlds In Us by the Minnesota Orchestra.  Recent performances include the premiere of new works commissioned by the Kronos Quartet, eighth blackbird, the Whitney Museum of Art and the Santa Fe New Music Ensemble.  She also recently received a Jerome Foundation Grant to support the creation of Song from the Uproar, a large-scale multimedia work featuring NOW Ensemble and filmmaker Stephen Taylor that premiered in May 2009.

The composer writes: Still Life with Avalanche is a pile of melodies collapsing in a chaotic free fall.  The players layer bursts of sound over the static drones of harmonicas, sketching out a strange and evocative sonic landscape.  I wrote this piece while in residence at Blue Mountain Center, a beautiful artist colony in upstate New York.  Halfway through my stay there I received a phone call telling me my cousin had passed away very suddenly. There's a moment in this piece when you can hear that phone call, when the piece changes direction, when the shock of real life works its way into the music's joyful and exuberant exterior.  This is a piece about finding beauty in chaos, and vice versa. It is dedicated to the memory (the joyful, the exuberant and the shocking) of Andrew Rose.

Still Life with Avalanche was commissioned by eighth blackbird through the generous support of Frederica and James R. Rosenfield, Kathleen Johnson and Paul Browning, Kirk Johnson, and William Johnson.

Pierre Boulez (b.1925) Derive 1 (1984)

One of twentieth century music's most controversial figures, Pierre Boulez once called for the destruction of the world's opera houses, and declared that, after the Second World War, it was necessary for music to be "ugly."  An initial passion for mathematics gave way to music theory studies with Olivier Messiaen, for which Boulez was awarded the Paris Conservatoire's Premier Prix for harmony.  The precocious young Frenchman began his dual career as composer and conductor in 1946; in that year he was appointed Music Director of small theater, and completed a handful of important early compositions.  Since then Boulez has conducted all of the great orchestras of the world, and his compositions are regularly performed at the far corners of the globe.

His music divides audiences.  According to the Guardian newspaper, reaction to a recent London performance of Boulez's Sur Incises was "passionately split between those who see it as 'preposterous drivel' perpetrated by a 'state-funded fraud,' and others talking of its 'gorgeous timbres' and one raving about its 'diamond-like clarity.' " At its most basic level, Derive 1 is a study in trills.  Layer upon layer of fluttering instruments create a dynamic, buzzing haze of ensemble sound that rises then falls, thickens then clarifies, overwhelms then recedes.  The composer has described his music is "seductive, even spiritual," and Derive 1 certainly creates an alluring universe of sound that is truly unique.  The work is one of a series based on harmonies derived from a musical spelling of Swiss conductor and patron Paul Sacher's last name.

Philippe Hurel (b.1955) ..à mesure (1996)

Philippe Hurel is a French composer of mostly orchestral and chamber works that have been performed throughout the world.  He studied musicology at the Université de Toulouse from 1974-79 and composition with Betsy Jolas and Ivo Malec at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris from 1980-83. He also had private studies in musical computer science with Tristan Murail in Paris in 1983.  He worked as a music researcher and taught composition at IRCAM, and served as composer-in-residence to the Arsenal de Metz and the Philharmonie de Lorraine. With Pierre André Valade he founded the new music ensemble Court-circuit in 1990 and has since served as its artistic director.

Critic Sylviane Falcinelli writes, "He'll tell you he likes systems, but observe, rather, the warmly exuberant voice, the zany vocabulary and the sparkling looks that shine from him while he's juggling with theories, and you'll learn a lot more about the bubbling excitement from which each of his composing projects draws its vigour.  He'll sing the praises of objectivity in art: get to know him, and you'll discover the intimately humane aspect, the poetic wonder and enthusiastic generosity which temper the harrowing vertigo that one experiences when faced with infinite possibles.  Cheekiness is the elegant mask that this reader of Goethe likes to wear.  Systems, computer-calculations and objectivity are merely the safeguards he uses to try and channel - precisely - that speck of madness which breathes the life of the unpredictable into the most skillfully configured combinations.  This is why his music speaks to us..."

The title, ..à mesure, makes reference to the French expression "au fur et à mesure," which means "progressively" or "little by little."  The piece is an unpredictable, constantly shifting kaleidoscope of textures and sounds that stretches the ensemble to its absolute technical limits.  The work explodes with an initial gesture of unhinged, forceful violence; this opening recurs several times, like a crash viewed from strikingly different angles, each time disintegrating and evolving "progressively" in different and unexpected ways: gestures speed up, careening dangerously as if locked in fast-forward; a fragment is repeated endlessly, looped into rigid, machine-like patterns, as if stuck in repeat; the music swims slowly through musical mud, as if caught in slow-mo.  Having seemingly exhausted itself, ..à mesure ends shrouded in mystery, with gauzy ensemble textures and tolling bells conjuring an uncertain, even funereal, atmosphere.

Philip Glass (b. 1937) Music in Similar Motion (1969)

Through his operas, his symphonies, his compositions for his own ensemble, and his wide-ranging collaborations with artists ranging from Twyla Tharp to Allen Ginsberg, Woody Allen to David Bowie, Philip Glass has had an extraordinary and unprecedented impact upon the musical and intellectual life of his times.  Glass is the first composer to win a wide, multi-generational audience in the opera house, the concert hall, the dance world, in film and in popular music, simultaneously.

Raised in Baltimore, he studied at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School and in Aspen with Darius Milhaud.  Finding himself dissatisfied with much of what then passed for modern music, he moved to Europe, where he studied with the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger (who also taught Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and Quincy Jones) and worked closely with the sitar virtuoso and composer Ravi Shankar.  He returned to New York in 1967 and formed the Philip Glass Ensemble – seven musicians playing keyboards and a variety of woodwinds, amplified and fed through a mixer.  The new musical style that Glass was evolving was eventually dubbed “minimalism.” Glass himself never liked the term and preferred to speak of himself as a composer of "music with repetitive structures." Much of his early work was based on the extended reiteration of brief, elegant melodic fragments that wove in and out of an aural tapestry.  Or, to put it another way, it immersed a listener in a sort of sonic weather that twists, turns, surrounds, develops.

Philip Glass's performance note for Music in Similar Motion gives a good indication of what to expect from this experimental early work: "In theory, the leader of the ensemble could indicate sufficient repeats that the work would last all night. The piece should be played at a constant dynamic: loud."  It is a headlong rush of fast, steady, seemingly unstoppable, constantly revolving eighth notes, resulting in music that is stark, bald, repetitive, hypnotic.  Glass has reduced each musical element to its simplest form: one harmony is sustained for the entire piece; melodies are constructed of two- or three-note fragments; the rhythm is generated by the fast, steady notes of melodies.  The composer writes, "The real innovation in Similar Motion is its sense of drama.  The earlier pieces were meditative, steady-state pieces that established a mood and stayed there.  But Similar Motion starts with one voice, then adds another playing a fourth above the original line, and then another playing a fourth below the original line, and finally a last line kicks in to complete the sound.  As each new voice enters, there is a dramatic change in the music."  The work can be played by any combination of instruments.

Thomas Adès (b. 1971) Catch (1991)

Renowned as a composer, conductor and pianist, London-born Thomas Adès works regularly with the world’s leading orchestras, opera companies and festivals.  Adès's most recent works include two solo piano works, Three Mazurkas and Concert Paraphrase on "Powder Her Face", and a "Piano concerto with moving image" entitled In Seven Days (2008), a collaboration with video artist Tal Rosner.  Forthcoming works include a new work for the Los Angeles Philharmonic (2011) and a second string quartet. Adès’ music has attracted numerous awards and prizes, including the prestigious Grawemeyer Award (in 2000, for Asyla), of which he is the youngest ever recipient.  Appointed to the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer Chair at Carnegie Hall for 2007/8, he was featured as composer, conductor and pianist throughout that season.  From 1999-2008 he was Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival.

Catch, written when the composer was 19 years old, takes listeners into the world of an English playground.  The composer writes:

There are several games going on: at the start, the clarinet is the outsider, the other three are the unit, then, after a decoy entry, the clarinet takes the initiative.  All four then play jovial "pig-in-the-middle" with each other. The clarinet is then phased out leaving a sullen piano and cello, with interjections based on the clarinet’s original tune.  This slower passage gradually mutates back into fast music, and this time the game is in earnest: the piano is squeezed out, only to lure the clarinet finally into the snare of its own music.

Adès imitates "childlike" play with chaotic, extreme and fiendishly difficult writing for the four instruments, from the cello playing in the piccolo's usual register or the piano audibly slamming down the sustaining pedal.  Many styles and sounds are thrown together in this piece - whether a waltz, an underwater passacaglia or a child's taunt - which conjure the exuberant experimentation of childhood.

Stephen Hartke (b. 1952) Meanwhile: Incidental music to imaginary puppet plays (2007)

Stephen Hartke has been hailed by the New York Times as one of America's "Young Lions."  His music reflects the diversity of his musical background, from medieval and renaissance polyphony, of which he was once quite an active performer, to very personal syntheses of diverse elements from non-Western and popular music.  He has enjoyed commissions and performances from numerous groups throughout the world, including the New York Philharmonic, the National Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Philharmonic, and the Moscow State Philharmonic Orchestra, among many others.  He recently completed a full-length opera, The Greater Good, or the Passion of Boule de Suif, for Glimmerglass Opera.  In 2004, he was awarded the Charles Ives Living Composers Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the purpose of which is to free him from the need to devote his time to any employment other than music composition.  Hartke's music is available on CD on CRI, ECM New Series, EMI Classics, Naxos American Classics, and New World Records. Stephen Hartke lives in Glendale, California, and is Professor of Composition at the University of Southern California.

About Meanwhile, the composer writes:

Meanwhile was composed on a commission from eighth blackbird and the Barlow Foundation, and it was nominated for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Music.  It is one of several works of mine that has grown from a long-standing fascination I have had for various forms of Asian court and theater music, and in preparing to write this piece, I studied video clips of quite a number of puppet theater forms, ranging from the elegant and elaborate, nearly-life-sized puppets of Japanese Bunraku, to Vietnamese water puppets, both Indonesian and Turkish shadow puppets, and to classic Burmese court theater that mixes marionettes with dancers who look and act like marionettes.

This piece is a set of incidental pieces to no puppet plays in particular, but one in which the ensemble has been reinvented along lines that clearly have roots in these diverse Asian models. The piano, for instance, is prepared for much of the piece with large soft mutes to resemble a Vietnamese hammered dulcimer.  The viola is tuned a half-step lower in order to both change its timbre and to open the way for a new set of natural harmonics to interact sometimes even microtonally with those of the cello.  The percussion array includes 18 wood sounds, plus 4 cowbells, 2 small cymbals, a water gong, and a set of bongos. Finally, there is a set of three Flexatones, whose tone is rather like that of small Javanese gongs, and so I have given this new instrument the name of Flexatone Gamelan.

Meanwhile is played as a single movement, with 6 distinct sections:  Procession, which features the flexatone Gamelan; Fanfares, with the piccolo and bass clarinet linked together much as a puppeteer and his marionette; Narration, in which the bass clarinet recites the ‘story’ of the scene in an extravagant and flamboyant solo reminiscent of the reciter in Japanese Bunraku; Spikefiddlers, which requires a playing technique for the viola and later the cello that stems from Central Asian classical music;  Cradle-songs, the outer parts of which feature natural harmonics in the viola and cello combined with bell-like 9th-partial harmonics from the piano; and Celebration, where the flutist and clarinetist take up flexatones to play the closing melody.