Program & Residency Schedule
Callithumpian Consort and Stephen Drury Residency
Sept. 19-23, 2011
Tuesday Sept. 20
2:30-3: 20—Callithumpian Consort Open Rehearsal, University Auditorium
7:30-- Callithumpian Concert, followed by meet-and-greet in foyer
Wednesday Sept. 21
10:30-11:20—Post-concert discussion/demo in University Auditorium
3:30-5—Piano master class. Haddock Hall in the Hampton School of Music.
Thursday, Sept. 22
7:30--Stephen Drury recital in the LHSOM Haddock Performance Hall
followed by meet-and-greet in the foyer
The public is welcome to these events. Only the two concerts require tickets.
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Program:
Credo in US John Cage (1912-1992)
Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion Béla Bartók (1881 – 1945)
I. Assai lento
II. Lento, ma non troppo
III. Allegro non troppo
INTERMISSION
Sextet Steve Reich (b. 1936)
I. [Fast]
II. [Moderate]
III. [Slow]
IV. [Moderate]
V. [Fast]
The Callithumpian Consort
Stephen Drury, Yukiko Takagi, pianos
Scott Deal, Jeffrey Means, Bill Solomon, Nick Tolle, percussionists
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Program Notes:
The Musicians
The CALLITHUMPIAN CONSORT is dedicated to the proposition that music is an experience. Founded by pianist and conductor Stephen Drury sometime in the 1990s, the Consort is a professional ensemble producing concerts of contemporary music at the highest standard. Stephen Drury created the Callithumpian Consort in the belief that new music should be an exciting adventure shared by performers and listeners alike, and that the brand new masterpieces of our day are beautiful, sensuous, challenging, delightful, provocative, and a unique joy. Our audiences bring fresh ears to sounds never heard before; they bring their experiences from rock stadiums, jazz clubs, and internet electronica to the concert hall. They hunger for the new.
Callithumpian's repertoire is the new and unusual, encompassing a huge stylistic spectrum from the classics of the last 100 years to works of the avant-garde and experimental jazz and rock. It is grounded in the musical discoveries of John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Zorn, Giacinto Scelsi, Morton Feldman, and Iannis Xenakis. Active commissioning and recording of new works is crucial to our mission. With grants from the Fromm Foundation and Meet the Composer we are currently commissioning new works from Christian Wolff and Tamar Diesendruck, as well as from younger composers Tolga Yayalar, Ashley Rose Fure, Ulrich Kreppein, and Per Bloland. We have worked closely with composers John Cage, Frederic Rzewki, Helmut Lachenmann, Michael Finnissy, Jonathan Harvey, Lee Hyla, John Zorn, John Luther Adams, Franco Donatoni, Lukas Foss, Christian Wolff, Jo Kondo and many others. Recordings are available on Tzadik, Mode, and New World Records.
Program Notes
John Cage: Credo in Us
John Cage wrote Credo in Us in 1942 for choreographers Merce Cunningham and Jean Erdman. The work premiered in August 1942, in Bennington Vermont, but in December that year, following the bombing of Pearly Harbor, Cage revised and re-titled the work. The title “Credo in Us” is a response to this moment in U.S. history.
Cage had been composing for percussion instruments and for the prepared piano since he began working with Cunningham at Cornish College in Seattle as a dance accompanist. In Credo in Us, for the first time, he also uses live radios or pre-selected recordings. The score indicates that at predetermined times the radio is turned on, or turned up into audible range: thus each performance of Credo in Us is different. The incorporation of random occurrence into the musical compositions, which had traditionally in Western music been controlled by the composer and the score, continued to be an important concept of Cage’s music through the 1950s.
Note by Mary DuPree
Béla Bartók: Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion
This is the composer’s only chamber work to involve percussion. The three orchestral works Bartók had written since 1926 which used piano and percussion had convinced him that one piano could not provide sufficient balance to the sharp sounds of the percussion section – hence the Sonata’s instrumentation. Bartók demanded intricate coordination from the two percussionists (although six were used in one early Italian performance), not just in the virtuoso playing of their seven instruments but also in achieving subtle distinctions of sound quality through using different wooden or metal beaters, and even the blade of a pocket-knife.
The three-movement structure, as with the immediately preceding Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta [which film buffs will recognize as the music used in Stanley Kubrik’s film The Shining], moves from a ‘closed’, twisting opening chromacism to the open, ‘acoustic’ scale forms of the finale. Moreover, the larger and smaller sections of these two works were early identified to have an uncanny sense of proportion, which the Hungarian analyst Erno Lendvai from the late 1940s onwards claimed as manifestations of golden section principles. Although Bartók appears not to have known about such proportions, and many of Lendvai’s calculations have since been discredited, it is undeniable that a fine sense of proportion and of chromatic–diatonic balance was articulated (in this work)
Note by Malcolm Gillies
Steve Reich: Sextet
The Sextet (1985) is in five movements played without pause. The relationship of the five movements is that of an arch form A-B-C-B-A. The first and last movements are fast, the second and forth moderate, and the third is slow. Changes of tempo are made abruptly at the beginning of new movements. . . . Movements are also organized harmonically with a chord cycle for the first and fifth, another for the second and fourth, and yet another for the third. . . .
Percussion instruments primarily produce sounds of relatively short duration. In Sextet I was interested in overcoming that limitation. In the second movement, the use of the bowed vibraphone, not merely as a passing effect but as a basic instrumental voice, was one means of getting long tones. The use of the synthesizer as electric organ supplied long continuous sounds not possible with the piano. The mallet instruments (marimba, vibraphone etc.) are basically instruments of high and middle register without a low range. To overcome this limit the bass drum was used, doubling piano or synthesizer played in their lower registers, particularly in the second, third, and fourth movements.
Compositional techniques used include . . . . sudden change of rhythmic position (or phase) of one voice in an overall repeating contrapuntal web and double canons, where one canon moves slowly (the bowed vibraphones) and the second moves quickly (the pianos).
Techniques influenced by African music, in which the basic ambiguity in meters of 12 beats between three groups of four and four groups of three, appear in the third and fifth movements. A rhythmically ambiguous pattern is played by the vibraphones in the third movement and accented sometimes in four and sometimes in three by the pianos. This occurs similarly in the fifth movement, but at a much faster tempo. The result is to change the perception of what is in fact not changing.
Another related, more recent technique that appears near the end of the fourth movement is to gradually remove the melodic material in the synthesizers, leaving the accompaniment of the two vibraphones to become the new melodic focus. Similarly, the accompaniment in the pianos in the second movement becomes the melody for the synthesizers in the fourth movement. The ambiguity here is between which is melody and which is accompaniment. In music that uses a great deal of repetition, I believe it is precisely these kinds of ambiguity that give vitality and life.
Note by Steve Reich