Daniel Schlosberg, composition, December 14, 2017

Robert Blocker, Dean

doctor of musica l a rts r ecita l

Daniel Schlosberg composition

Thursday, December 14, 2017 • 7:30 pm Morse Recital Hall

doctor of musical arts recital

Daniel Schlosberg, composition December 14, 2017 • Morse Recital Hall

Daniel Schlosberg text adapted by Daniel Schlosberg from Edgar Allan Poe’s “Berenice”

Teeth (2015) from Invisible Anatomy’s BODY PARTS Prologue Fugue I Room I Fugue II Room II Fugue III Room III

text by Daniel Schlosberg

Into You (2017) from Invisible Anatomy’s TRANSFIGURE pause

adapted and translated

by Dustin Wills, from Federico García Lorca’s Así que pasen cinco años

Selections from Once Five Years Pass (2015) Overture Texas Tomorrow’s Sun I’ll Come Back for My Wings The Wedding Night Blood Moon Deep in the Heart of a Dream Lament of the Mask Almost Love Duet Nightingale A Little Light for My Son I’m Still So Far Away Coda

Special thanks to William Gardiner, Nate Huvard, Matthew Keown, Nate May, Cathy and Jeremy Schlosberg, Jack Vees, and the Yale Percussion Group.

This performance is in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Musical Arts degree.

yale school of music

creative team

ensemble

Dustin Wills, director Joey Moro, lighting designer

Gleb Kanasevich, clarinet A Jacob Ashworth, violin A Jillian Blythe, cello Tristan Kasten-Krause, bass and guitar Fay Wang, voice* A Benjamin Wallace, percussion* A Brendon Randall-Myers, guitars and mandolin* A Paul Kerekes, piano* A Daniel Schlosberg, piano* A

cast Dramatist Dustin Wills Young Man Andrew Burnap John, his servant Harlequin Aubie Merrylees Typist Juliana Canfield Dead Boy lizzie fox Dead Cat FiancĂŠe Masked Woman Anna Crivelli Friend Mannequin Ato Blankson-Wood

* member of Invisible Anatomy A Yale School of Music alumnus

artist profiles

Daniel Schlosberg ’10ba, ’13mm, ’14mma, composition

virtuosic physicality, and dramatic visual presentation. IA’s inaugural show, BODY PARTS, dismembered, manipulated, and The music of composer and pianist Daniel reanimated bodies in performance — Schlosberg has been performed by the creating a chattering chorus of woodblock Dover Quartet, Minnesota Orchestra, teeth and screaming eyes on TV screens.

Nashville Symphony, Cabrillo Festival After the IA’s 2015 debut concerts in New Orchestra, Lorelei Ensemble, and Amphion York City, they were invited to China for Quartet at venues including Carnegie three shows, including a featured solo Hall, (le) poisson rouge, Royal Albert concert at the Beijing Modern Music Hall, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Festival. IA’s second season opened with an and Beijing Modern Music Festival, and intimate house concert of BODY PARTS, has been featured on WNYC’s Soundcheck. hosted by David Lang, followed by the Schlosberg is a recipient of the 2014 Charles world premiere of DISSECTIONS at Ives Scholarship from the American Brooklyn’s National Sawdust, which was Academy of Arts and Letters and a 2014 the subject of a full-length feature in the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Village Voice. IA performed DISSECTIONS Award. Recent commissions include works at Pomona College and The Blue Whale for the Dover Quartet, Albany Symphony, in Los Angeles in February 2016, and and Chamber Music Northwest. Daniel appeared on Heartbeat Opera’s Collaboret continues to perform around the world, Series; at Roulette Intermedium in collaborating with such luminaries as Brooklyn; at the Yale School of Music in David Shifrin, Tara Helen O’Connor, and New Haven; and at Ars Nova’s ANT Fest the Imani Winds. He is co-founder of the in Manhattan. The group was the runnercomposer-performer ensemble Invisible up in the 2016 SAVVY Chamber Anatomy and co-music director of Competition at the University of South Heartbeat Opera. He enjoys baking cookies, Carolina School of Music, and recorded and his work has been described as “richly their debut studio album in June. detailed yet delicate” by The New York Times and “witty” and “ingenious” by On Halloween 2016, IA produced The Wall Street Journal.

FUNHOUSE, an immersive presentation of art installations and performances in a prewar Victorian Harlem brownstone.

Invisible Anatomy Recent engagements include a gala performance hosted by Pulitzer PrizeInvisible Anatomy is a composer-performer winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis, an ensemble that explores the human body evening-length show at Roulette in as the most fundamental aspect of music Brooklyn, as well as appearing on the creation and performance. Incorporating Detroit Institute of Art’s Friday Night elements from classical, jazz, experimental Live series in March 2017. rock, performance art, and theater, Invisible Anatomy (IA) creates performances that IA’s members have been awarded honors combine an omnivorous stylistic palate, from the American Academy of Arts and

notes on the program

Letters, ASCAP, American Composers’ Forum, and the China National Arts Fund. IA is fiscally sponsored by Bang on a Can and is the recipient of a 2017 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant. program note Teeth

by Daniel Schlosberg Invisible Anatomy’s inaugural show, BODY PARTS, for which Teeth was written, arose out of a desire to reclaim the notion that the acts of performing and composing need not be entirely divorced from one another. IA feels that the compositional process must necessarily take into account the physicality of performing; the performing body is our inspiration and vehicle for communication. Personally, I find that the more I can “envision” the performance of a piece as I am writing it, and particularly the performers themselves playing it, the more successful the result. Invisible Anatomy became a sort of crucible for the act of writing for specific “performing personalities.” The staves in my scores for the group are not designated “percussion, piano, guitar, voice, and cello” but “Ben, Paul, Brendon, Fay, and Ian,” because I am writing for those people, not abstract instruments without a performer. I challenge myself not to feel bound by conventions of instrumentation; in Teeth, in addition to playing their designated instrument, everyone plays percussion and everyone sings.

Teeth is about morbid, deadly obsession.

Edgar Allan Poe’s narrator cannot shake the thought of “white, glistening, and ghastly” teeth. The music chatters and

quivers, falls into monotonous repetitive ruts, and folds in on itself. My debt to Poe lies in the music’s consciously “gothic” veneer, complete with all of the spooks and screams one might expect. The piece marks the beginning of a foray into narrative monodrama, and here I harness the juxtaposition of styles to create meaning.

As the narrator wanders from room to room in his vague, gloomy manor, his attempts to find solace ultimately prove futile, leading him back to confront the very specimen of his nightmarish fixation. text Teeth text adapted by Daniel Schlosberg from Edgar Allan Poe’s “Berenice” Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of the earth is multiform. How is it from Beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness?

I have a tale to tell in its own essence rife with horror.

She was my cousin. Berenice! Gorgeous yet fantastic beauty. Disease fell upon her.

The spirit of change swept over her — pervading her mind, disturbing her very identity. Epilepsy, trance, dissolution.

Most surely I had never loved her. She was the Berenice of a dream.

I spoke to her of marriage. My own disease grew rapidly upon me. Monomania — a nervous intensity of interest in even the most common objects of the universe. To lose myself for an entire night in watching the steady flame of a lamp. To repeat monotonously some word or phrase until the sound ceased to convey any idea

notes on the program

whatsoever to the mind. Undue, intense, morbid attention.

body — yet still breathing — still palpitating — still alive! He pointed to a spade on the wall. The ebony box slipped from my hands and burst into pieces.

Berenice stood before me. Any icy chill ran through my frame. I remained breathless and motionless. My burning glances Most surely I had never loved her. She fell upon her face. Eyes lifeless, lustreless was the Berenice of a dream.

— lips thin, shrunken. They parted — the teeth of the changed Berenice. Would to The ebony box burst into pieces. There God that I had never beheld them, or rolled out instruments of dental surgery, that having done so, died! intermingled with many white and glistening substances scattered to and The teeth! The teeth! They were here, fro about the floor. and there, and everywhere, long, narrow, and excessively white, the pale lips program note writhing about them.

Into You

by Daniel Schlosberg I had no thoughts but the teeth. I sat motionless in that solitary room.

Into You, like TRANSFIGURE, Invisible Suddenly, I heard a wild cry of horror Anatomy’s third show of which it was a and dismay — Berenice was no more! part, explores change and insidious transformation. Rhythms gradually morph I went to the coffin. I had no longer the into other rhythms, orchestration shifts power to move. I gazed upon the frightful subtly throughout, and performers physilength of the rigid body. God of Heaven! — cally switch instruments. The music builds, is it possible? Is it my brain that reels — or reaching a “point of no return” after which was it indeed the outstretched finger of the ensemble becomes a single organism, the dead that stirred? I raised my eyes, moving and breathing as one. and once again there glared upon me in too palpable reality, the white and Performing these two pieces for the first glistening, and ghastly teeth of Berenice. time here in Sprague Hall, with an ensemble whose formation and development I found myself alone in that room, alone. owes so much to this institution and its I had awaken from a confused and exmilieu, feels like coming full circle. As citing dream. The shrill piercing shriek composer-performers at Yale, my colleagues of a female voice seemed to be ringing in and I often found ourselves recruited to my ears. On the table beside me, a lamp perform in each other’s premieres, and was burning. And near it lay a little box we quickly realized that our shared backof ebony. Why did I shudder? ground as composers and expertise as performers contributed to an immensely A servant entered. His looks were wild fulfilling musical experience. There was with terror. He told of a wild cry disturb- less of a need to “translate” our intentions, ing the silence of the night. A disfigured a free and flexible workshop atmosphere,

notes on the program

and above all an enormous appetite for experimentation and risk-taking. As we grew into a professional ensemble outside of Yale, our guiding question became, “what can we make here as composers and performers that we can’t make anywhere else?” Both Teeth and Into You embody that pursuit. text Into You

by Daniel Schlosberg I creep behind your eyes Sand falls beside you I make myself comfortable inside your neck program note Selections from Once Five Years Pass

by Daniel Schlosberg I have a kind of love-hate relationship with musical theater. At its worst, it can seem unapologetically commercial, a mishmash of recycled formulas whose sole purpose is to engender calibrated, stereotypical emotional responses. (The same critique might have been lobbed at Italian opera in, say, the early nineteenth century. We are still living in the age of Broadway musicals and thus history has only just begun its trash-sorting.) At its best, however, musical theater is a tourde-force of vernacular communication. A great show’s genius lies in the composer’s capacity to harness a relatively limited set of musical resources to communicate all of the subtleties of the human experience.

That is not to say musicals should not be adventurous or even avant-garde; on the contrary, the best often are. But a composer’s ability to push boundaries and

bend genres is dependent on the audience’s ability to comprehend such music as boundary-pushing and genre-bending.

I have always felt that musical theater could stand to benefit from sidelong glances at opera, given the latter’s storied history of developing techniques for dramatic cohesion. In writing the score for Once Five Years Pass, I made the conscious choice to rely on a limited set of musical motifs to bind the piece together. One motif in particular, heard at the outset of “Texas” (titled to evoke the feeling of a desolate West Texas landscape rather than to denote the actual place) and associated with the Young Man, provides the basis from which almost all of the subsequent music germinates. As the Young Man’s reality is increasingly impinged upon by delirious fantasy, culminating in the proto-David-Lynch dream-fantasy world of Act 3, the “Texas” motif begins to infiltrate every aspect of the music.

For the show’s premiere at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, the actors were also the band, speaking, singing, and playing instruments in heroically frenzied alternation — Dustin and I wanted to impart a sense of the world of the play as being “created” entirely within the diegesis, that is, entirely by the performers onstage. With some exceptions, my writing reflects a corresponding need to work within the confines of the (nonprofessional) musical skill sets of the actor-musicians.

In addition, I took the surrealistic veneer of Federico García Lorca’s play as an opportunity to lean towards musical intelligibility rather than the reverse. In doing so, I attempt to accomplish two objectives: revealing the logic of Lorca’s

notes on the program

sometimes confounding scenarios, and accessing the intense emotional realism I believe is at the heart of, or masquerading as, surrealism. synopsis Así que pasen cinco años (Once Five Years Pass)

by Dustin Wills “Beneath the poetry of the text there is the actual poetry, without form and without text.”

—Antonin Artaud PROLOGUE The Dramatist introduces the production and implores the audience to use their imagination.

FIRST ACT A Young Man’s marriage to his fiancée, who he’s only met once, has been delayed for five years. In the interim, three specters haunt his library: An Old Man who sees all time, a Drunk Man who only sees the present, and a Friend who wants to stop time. The Young Man’s Typist interrupts these spirits to confess her love for him and is subsequently turned out of the house. The Young Man’s servant, John, warns the Young Man of a gathering storm and two other disquieting figures break into his home from another dimension: A Dead Boy and a Dead Cat. SECOND ACT After a steamy love scene between the Football Player and the Fiancée, the Young Man finally arrives five years later

to meet his bride. Their reunion is cold and bitter and she eventually escapes with the Football Player leaving the Young Man alone. A Mannequin wearing the bride’s unworn wedding gown comes to life and demands he seek the love of the Typist who he turned away years ago.

THIRD ACT The Harlequin welcomes us deep into a dream — represented as a surreal forest near a circus full of souls searching for their lost loves (such as a destitute countess in a Mask). The Young Man desperately searches for the Typist who once showed him affection, but upon finding her and confessing his love she reveals she cannot be with him until five more years pass.

But the Young Man knows he is out of time, and she then turns to stone. The Young Man returns home where three Card Players play him in a fatal hand of poker, which he loses when forced to expose his Ace of Hearts. He is left alone to die, crying out for “any man.” *Underlined names are characters you will encounter in today’s concert. director’s note Así que pasen cinco años

by Dustin Wills Once Five Years Pass (August 1931) is a kaleidoscopic story of homosexual awakening, reckoning, and torture. Its layers are rich and complex, heavily influenced by surrealism and Andalusian tradition — both cultural and social. It is a play created in a world bereft of any public queer discourse or even adequate language — an endless desert to those who felt

notes on the program

different. It therefore makes sense that “Comprendí que me habían asesinado. much of Once Five Years Pass is understood Recorrieron los cafés y los cementerios in coded visual symbols, embodiment of y las iglesias, the subconscious, and paradoxes. abrieron los toneles y los armarios, destrozaron tres esqueletos para arrancar It is Federico García Lorca’s most sus dientes de oro. personal work and his only play with a Ya no me encontraron. male protagonist: a Young Man afraid to ¿No me encontraron? grow up, who is comfortable in his No. No me encontraron.” child-like pre-sexual and dream-like — Federico García Lorca state. He is afraid that his fiancée — from Poeta in Nueva York (1929) whom he met as a child — will, once five years pass, become a fully-grown woman.

He is terrified of reckoning with the power of his forbidden (homosexual) desire and crippled by his fear of being unable to procreate and produce a son to carry on his bloodline — without which the Young Man becomes, in essence, the murderer of his entire family. The women he pursues both innately understand that his desire for them is purely procreational and not connected in any way to passionate desire, and because of this they both retreat from his pursuits leaving him alone and childless. Because of this crime he must be put to death by the Card Players, who act as executioners. In a frightening coincidence, five years to the day — August 18, 1936 — after Lorca completed the first draft of Once Five Years Pass, he was captured by the fascist Franco regime while hiding in a friend’s home (awaiting a flight to take refuge in Mexico with his young male lover). Many sources claim he was working on revising this very play while in hiding. Two days later Lorca was executed by firing squad, though neither his body nor the alleged revised draft of this play were ever recovered.

Robert Blocker, Dean

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