yale percussion group
Robert van Sice, Director February 23, 2014 • Morse Recital Hall
Robert Blocker, Dean
YSM Ensembles
yale percussion group Sunday, February 23, 2014 • 8:00 pm • Morse Recital Hall Robert van Sice, director
Steven Mackey b. 1956
It Is Time I. Metronome II. Steel Drums III. Marimba IV. Drums V. Epilogue Jonathan Allen, drumset Garrett Arney, marimba Douglas Perry, steel pans Terrence Sweeney, accessories
intermission
Tōru Takemitsu 1930–1996
Rain Tree Mari Yoshinaga Garrett Arney Georgi Videnov
Steve Reich b. 1936
Sextet Jonathan Allen Garrett Arney Douglas Perry Terrence Sweeney Georgi Videnov Mari Yoshinaga
As a courtesy to the performers and audience, silence all electronic devices. Please do not leave the hall during selections. Photography or recording of any kind is prohibited.
Artist Bios
Founded in 1997 by Robert van Sice, the Yale Percussion Group has been called “something truly extraordinary” by composer Steve Reich. It is composed of talented and dedicated young artists who have come from around the world for graduate study at the Yale School of Music. Members of the YPG have gone on to form the acclaimed percussion quartet Sō, and to perform with the Oslo Philharmonic and Auckland Philharmonic, and are percussionists in America’s great chamber music ensembles including Chamber Music at Lincoln Center, and the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. Currently, alumni of YPG teach at the University of Miami, Michigan State University, Baylor University, Bard College, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Cornell, University of Alabama, Notre Dame, and Dartmouth University, and the University of Kansas.
Robert van Sice, percussion, has premiered more than one hundred works, including concertos, chamber music, and solos. He has made solo appearances with symphony orchestras and given recitals in Europe, North America, Africa, and the Far East. In 1989 he gave the first fulllength marimba recitals at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and has since played in most of Europe’s major concert halls, many of which have been broadcast by the BBC, Swedish Radio, Norwegian Radio, WDR, and Radio France. He is frequently invited as a soloist with Europe’s leading contemporary music ensembles and festivals, including the London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Contrechamps, and L’Itinéraire and the Archipel, Darmstadt, and North American new music festivals. From 1988 to 1997 he headed Europe’s first diploma program for solo marimbists at the Rotterdam Conservatorium. Mr. van Sice has given master classes in more than twenty countries and frequently visits the
major conservatories in Europe as a guest lecturer. He joined the Yale faculty in the fall of 1997.
steven mackey It Is Time It Is Time marshals the virtuosity of the individual members to speed, slow, warp, celebrate and mourn our perceptions of time. Each of the four sections of the piece is a mini-concerto for one of the players. The first performer leads the music in a multi-percussion set up composed of metronome with delay, pump organ, bells, china cymbal on hi-hat stand, and a few other assorted toys. The next performers follow on steel drums, marimba, and drumset. It Is Time was inspired by my young son Jasper (now 30 months old). As an older father (now 664 months old) I felt, for the first time in my life, saddened by the immutability of time and the finite limits to how much of it I will be able to spend with my young family. It Is Time fantasizes that we might have agency with respect to time. An African poet named Isaac Maliya wrote a poem called “Time is Time.” The first stanza - “Time sits, Time stands, Time is Time” - suggested a terse melody that became a dominant lyrical element in the piece. It is first unveiled in the steel drums movement but shards of it permeate much of the music. – Steve Mackey About the composer: Steven Mackey was born in 1956, to American parents stationed in Frankfurt, Germany. He is regarded as one of the leading composers of his generation and has composed for orchestra, chamber ensembles, dance, and opera. His first
Program Notes
musical passion was playing the electric guitar in rock bands based in northern California. He blazed a trail in the 1980s and 1990s by including the electric guitar and vernacular music influence in his concert music. He regularly performs his own work, including two electric guitar concertos and numerous solo and chamber works. He is also active as an improvising musician and performs with his band, Big Farm.
the changes in light, pattern, and texture. I do not like to emphasize too much with my music. Someone once criticized my music as getting to be very old fashioned. Maybe I am old, but I am looking back to the past with nostalgia. Composers are sometimes afraid to use tonality, but we can use anything from the tonal to the atonal – this is our treasure. I can say that because I am Japanese!” About the composer:
tōru takemitsu Rain Tree There are three compositions by Takemitsu on the subject of the Rain Tree. Rain Tree Sketch (1982) and Rain Tree Sketch II (1992, in memoriam Olivier Messiaen) are among Takemitsu’s most often performed piano works. The origin of the Rain Tree Sketches can be traced back to Takemitsu’s percussion trio Rain Tree (1981). Rain Tree is used as a metaphor of water circulating in the cosmos, and Takemitsu employed Messiaen’s modes of limited transposition in order to construct the pitch collections evocative of cosmic imagery. Takemitsu’s goal as an artist was to expand the possibilities of music and to express himself through creation of a universal language. The title was suggested by a passage from the novel Atama no ii, Ame no Ki by Kenzaburo Oe: “It has been named the ‘rain tree,’ for its abundant foliage continues to let fall rain drops collected from last night’s shower until well after the following midday. Its hundreds of thousands of tiny leaves - finger-like - store up moisture while other trees dry up at once. What an ingenious tree, isn’t it?” Tōru Takemitsu during an interview (1993): “My music is like a garden, and I am the gardener. Listening to my music can be compared to walking through a garden and experiencing
Tōru Takemitsu (1931-1996) was a self-taught Japanese composer who combined elements of Eastern and Western music and philosophy to create a unique sound world. Some of his early influences were the sonorities of Debussy, and Messiaen’s use of nature imagery and modal scales. There is a certain influence of Webern in Takemitsu’s use of silence, and Cage in his compositional philosophy, but his overall style is uniquely his own. Takemitsu believed in music as a means of ordering or contextualizing everyday sound in order to make it meaningful or comprehensible. His philosophy of “sound as life” lay behind his incorporation of natural sounds, as well as his desire to juxtapose and reconcile opposing elements such as Orient and Occident, sound and silence, and tradition and innovation. From the beginning, Takemitsu wrote highly experimental music involving improvisation, graphic notation, unusual combinations of instruments and recorded sounds. The result is music of great beauty and originality. It is usually slowly paced and quiet, but also capable of great intensity. The variety, quantity and consistency of Takemitsu’s output are remarkable considering that he never worked within any kind of conventional framework or genre. In addition to the several hundred independent works of music, he scored over ninety films and published twenty books.
Program Notes
Takemitsu had no important teachers, and his musical career really began with the formation of the Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop) to promote and perform mixed-media art works. It was Stravinsky’s acclaim of the Requiem for strings in 1959 that launched Takemitsu’s international career. The next few years produced a wide variety of works including Takemitsu’s prolific film work, and numerous new music concerts and festivals that culminated in 1967 with a commission for the 125th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic. By this time, Takemitsu had begun using traditional Japanese instruments in his music. November Steps is one of his most successful combinations of Eastern and Western music; Takemitsu’s style was created from, and rooted in both. Takemitsu’s international fame skyrocketed after this premiere, flooding him with commissions and honors that established him as one of the most influential Japanese composers of the century.
steve reich Sextet Sextet 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 fourth moderate and the third, slow. Changes of tempo are made abruptly at the beginning of new movements by metric modulation to either get slower or faster. Movements are also organized harmonically with the chord cycle for the first and fifth, another for the second and fourth, and yet another for the third. The harmonies used are largely dominant chords with added tones creating a somewhat darker, chromatic, and more varied harmonic language were suggested by The Desert Music (1984).
Percussion instruments mostly produce sounds of relatively short duration. In this piece, I was interested in overcoming that limitation. The use of the bowed vibraphone, not merely as a passing effect, but as a basic instrumental voice in the second movement, was one means of getting long continuous sounds not possible with 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 the piano or synthesizer played in their lower register, particularly in the second, third, and fourth movements. Compositional techniques used include some introduced in my music as early as Drumming in 1971. In particular the substitution of beats for rests to “build-up” a canon between two or more identical instruments playing the same repeating pattern is used extensively in the first and last movements. Sudden change of rhythmic position (or phase) of one voice in an overall repeating contrapuntal web first occurs in my Six Pianos of 1973 and occurs throughout this work. Double canons, where one canon moves slowly (the bowed vibraphones) and the second moves quickly (the pianos), first appear in my music in Octet of 1979. Techniques influenced by African music, where the basic ambiguity in meters of 12 beats is between 3 groups of 4 and 4 groups of 3, appear in the third and fifth movements. A rhythmically ambiguous pattern is played by vibraphones in the third 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 appearing 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 piano
Program Notes
in the second movement becomes the melody for the synthesizer in the fourth movement. The ambiguity here is between which is melody and which is accompaniment. In music which uses a great deal of repetition, I believe it is precisely these kinds of ambiguities that give vitality and life. Sextet was commissioned by Laura Dean Dancers and Musicians and by the French government for the Nexus Percussion Ensemble. – Steve Reich About the composer: Steve Reich has been called “America’s greatest living composer” (The Village VOICE), “...the most original musical thinker of our time” (The New Yorker), and “...among the great composers of the century” (New York Times). His music has been influential to composers and mainstream musicians all over the world. He is a leading pioneer of Minimalism, having in his youth broken away from the “establishment” that was serialism. His music is known for steady pulse, repetition, and a fascination with canons; it combines rigorous structures with propulsive rhythms and seductive instrumental color. It also embraces harmonies of non-Western and American vernacular music (especially jazz). His studies have included the Gamelan, African drumming (at the University of Ghana), and traditional forms of chanting the Hebrew scriptures. Different Trains and Music for 18 Musicians have each earned him GRAMMY awards, and his “documentary video opera” works—The Cave and Three Tales, done in collaboration with video artist Beryl Korot—have pushed the boundaries of the operatic medium. Over the years his music has
significantly grown both in expanded harmonies and instrumentation, resulting in a Pulitzer Prize for his 2007 composition, Double Sextet. Reich’s music has been performed by major orchestras and ensembles around the world, including the New York and Los Angeles philharmonics; London, San Francisco, Boston, and BBC symphony orchestras; London Sinfonietta; Kronos Quartet; Ensemble Modern; Ensemble Intercontemporain; Bang on a Can All-Stars; and eighth blackbird. Several noted choreographers have created dances to his music, such as Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Jirí Kylían, Jerome Robbins, Wayne McGregor, and Christopher Wheeldon. “There’s just a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history and Steve Reich is one of them.” — The Guardian (London) Steve Reich is published by Boosey & Hawkes. This biography is reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes.
Upcoming Events
Philharmonia at Sprague february 28 Yale Philharmonia Morse Recital Hall | Friday | 8 pm Featuring Jonathan Brandani, and Louis Lohraseb, conductors. Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, “Eroica”; Copland: Music for the Theatre; Wagner: Siegfried Idyll Free Admission
Vista: A Fresh Look at Chamber Music march 4 Morse Recital Hall | Tuesday | 8 pm Top student ensembles perform and provide insight into their repertoire. Free Admission
Ettore Causa, viola Boris Berman, piano march 5 Faculty Artist Series Morse Recital Hall | Wednesday | 8 pm Music by Schubert, Stravinsky, and Brahms. Free Admission
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Miró String Quartet march 25 Oneppo Chamber Music Series Morse Recital Hall | Tuesday | 8 pm Schubert: Quartet in D minor, D. 810, “Death and the Maiden”; Beethoven: String Quartet in B-flat major, Op. 18, No. 6, “La melancolia”; Dutilleux: Ainsi la Nuit Tickets start at $30 • Students $12
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Robert Blocker, Dean