Robert Blocker, Dean
doctor of musical arts degree recital
Patrick Jankowski, horn with Karl Larson, piano Thursday, December 6, 2018 | 7:30 pm | Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall
Kate Soper b. 1981
Into that World Inverted (2010)
Thea Musgrave b. 1928
Music for Horn and Piano (1967)
Charles Gounod 1818–1893
Mélodies pour cor à pistons et piano (1841–1848) I. Larghetto V. Andante cantabile VI. Andante sostenuto
Hector Berlioz 1803–1869
Le jeune pâtre breton, H. 65 (1835) Isabel Lepanto Gleicher, flute
Toshio Hosokawa b. 1955
Kleine Blume (2014)
intermission
Whitney E. George
Spare Bedroom, for horn and fixed media (2014) A rescoring of the 1970 silent film by Frans Zwartjes
Claudio Monteverdi 1567–1643 arr. Patrick Jankowski
“Lamento della Ninfa” from Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi, SV. 163 (1638) Isabel Lepanto Gleicher, alto flute Fiona Last, English horn Georgeanne Banker, bassoon Rémy Taghavi, bassoon
Kevin Ernste b. 1973
Nisi, for horn and electronics (2012)
This performance is in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Musical Arts degree. As a courtesy to others, please silence all devices. Photography and recording of any kind is strictly prohibited. Please do not leave the hall during musical selections. Thank you.
Artist Profile Patrick Jankowski, horn A native of Cape Canaveral, Florida, Patrick Jankowski is a horn player, writer, and teacher based in the New York City area. As a soloist and together with SoundMind, Patrick has premiered and recorded works by several living composers, and collaborated on projects with the Clark Art Institute, the Nassau County Museum of Art, the Concrete Timbre series in Brooklyn, and others. The quintet has been featured by the New York Composers’ Circle, the composition department at The Manhattan School of Music, and the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music’s Parlor Room Series, among others, and will hold residencies at Third Street Music Settlement and the Lake George Music Festival in its upcoming season. As a soloist and chamber musician, he has played with a number of the city’s new music ensembles, including The Curiosity Cabinet, Contemporaneous, and with MATA, appearing at Carnegie Hall, National Sawdust, and the Kitchen. As a core member of the conductorless chamber orchestra One Found Sound in San Francisco, Patrick gives several performances throughout the year in the Bay Area, and has performed with the Annapolis Chamber Music Festival since its founding in 2015. Beyond music, Patrick devotes his attention to writing. His program annotations and articles have been featured in domestic and international publications, and he was a Fellow at the 2018 Rubin Institute for Music Criticism in San Francisco. He has written and edited content for college textbooks for McGraw-Hill, and worked with Juilliard’s Global K–12 Program in developing sustainable collaborations in the Americas, Asia, and Europe. He works
with the U.K.-based firm Moving Performance, using music as an adult learning tool with high-profile corporate clients. Patrick is on faculty at Hunter College in New York City, and in the Music Advancement Division at The Juilliard School, where he teaches variously in the areas of horn and musicianship, music history, and the arts in society. He lives in Westport, Connecticut, with his partner Brent and their German Shepherd, Scarlet.
Program Notes by Patrick Jankowski Into That World Inverted Soper I was first drawn to Kate Soper’s music after seeing a performance of her Voices from the Killing Jar, a song cycle (for lack of a better word) in which different protagonists, all played by a single vocalist, are suffocated by their own circumstantial, metaphorical death traps. The woman is physically surrounded by an instrumental ensemble, and her voice is recorded, processed, and played back to her in distorted tones. The soprano must do everything from squeal on a clarinet to scrape at cymbals with metal-fingered gloves. The physical and emotional demands that Soper makes on performers are a vital element in her work. Playing Into That World Inverted is a visceral experience, and one which exposes the musicians’ raw vulnerability. She treats the instruments themselves as physical bodies, inhabited by the performers as they explore their internal skeletons and external shells. Soper calls the work “a light exploration of the interiority of instruments.” She explores the insides of the horn in its stopped notes, echo tones, harmonics, and half-valved moans. Phantom-like harmonics and percussive tones emerge from the piano’s strings: their resonance vacuumed up inside the instrument’s body. “Interiority” does not necessarily signify quiet, and at times Soper asks the players to push strongly against the resistances that they themselves create. The resulting tensions are made even more angsty in the often-misaligned rhythmic interactions between the two. The horn playing into the piano’s strings, their two
sounds converge, and activate one another. In a haunting central episode, the piano’s deep fortissimo clusters create a dense sound mass over which the horn strains to be heard. Frenetically testing open and closed tones and trills against the engulfing current, only when it settles onto a strident F above does the conflict feel even momentarily resolved. Whether in defiance or desperation, the horn activates the piano’s strings with its tone. Although there is no specific program attached to the work, its theatricality and rhetoric invites a dramatic interpretation. As a compliment, Elizabeth Bishop’s poem Insomnia, from which the piece’s title is derived, may illuminate Soper’s introspective sound world... Insomnia (1951) Bishop The moon in the bureau mirror looks out a million miles (and perhaps with pride, at herself, but she never, never smiles) far and away beyond sleep, or perhaps she’s a daytime sleeper. By the Universe deserted, she’d tell it to go to hell, and she’d find a body of water, or a mirror, on which to dwell. So wrap up care in a cobweb and drop it down the well into that world inverted where left is always right, where the shadows are really the body, where we stay awake all night, where the heavens are shallow as the sea is now deep, and you love me.
Music for Horn and Piano musgrave
before plunging down several octaves and handing its line back over to the piano.
Thea Musgrave celebrated her ninetieth birthday this year with several world premieres and featured concerts, including a weeklong festival of her music in Stockholm just last week (including a performance of this very work, a half-century after its premiere). Given the long-overdue recognition of female composers in our intimate world, it feels especially appropriate to celebrate the lifelong artistic contributions of a composer who identifies as a woman. Musgrave, however, gives little fanfare to this aspect of her identity. “When I’m composing, I’m a human being,” she noted in a recent interview. “It isn’t a question of sexuality.” So while it is tempting to view her music – and that of many others – through the lens of femininity, it is perhaps more appropriate to admire the strength of her compositional voice over the past seventy years, against a male-dominated field.
Musgrave introduces a series of gestures (inky drones and isolated birdsongs evocative of Bartok’s nocturnal landscapes... robust horn calls... descending lament patterns... the subtlest echoes of blues scales... frenzied dances... snarling stopped horn interruptions... slinky tangos... ominous movie villain fanfares...) and exchanges them between the horn and piano in an ongoing push-and-pull that converges in moments of canon and chase. The ideas begin to repeat, reflect, and compliment one another. We hear familiar statements return in new transformations and combinations. The conclusion of the piece, as a result, somehow feels both surprising and inevitable. Musgrave constructs the mechanism for aria-like interpretive freedom within the score, so that complex rhythmic counterpoint between the voices fits organically inside a framework of characters in dialogue. Within this intricate and carefully engineered skeleton, even if we expect to uncover systems and abstractions, we instead find feelings personalities. In other words, this is music.
In both name and form, Music for Horn and Piano is amusingly ambiguous, revealing no obvious aspirations towards traditional constructions for these two instruments. Instead, the piece works like an episodic dialogue: a conversation between two individuals who occasionally listen to one another but often do not. The expressive, humanistic spirit of recitative and aria shades the whole work, even in subtle sideways glances at continuo style in the piano’s figures. After a few disagreements with the piano over the opening harmony, the horn makes a brief soliloquy. The piano responds playfully, and the horn begins an upward climb atop pulsating triplets,
Mélodies pour cor à pistons et piano gounod “We must prevent, as much as possible, the invention of the valves from destroying the charm of timbre variations. It’s to the skill, care, and taste of the instrumentalist that we entrust the maintaining of this color intrinsic to the horn, never let it degenerate into a sort of trombone.” These remarks from Charles Gounod (with all due respect to trombonists) are essential
Program Notes cont. to the narrative of how and why these melodies came to be. The composer is among many in the mid-nineteenth century who cautiously embraced the valved horn in its infancy, even writing a method for it. The valve (emerging some time around 1814) allowed horn players to modulate between keys more freely than on a natural horn, with which the practical limitations of switching crooks posed obvious logistical challenges. Clearly, not everyone was convinced. In an 1833 review, one critic noted that with this new innovation, “the horn especially would lose this shy and virginal expression which gives it so much charm, and, in wanting too much to multiply the resources of instrumentation, one risks making of it something trivial, like a coquette who loses some of her real and naïve appeal for every bit of finery she puts on.” Open-minded musicians recognized that the horn need not lose this charm simply because of the new invention. Every other composer of original music for horn on this program, from Kate Soper to Kevin Ernste, inherits a tradition, dating back to the instrument’s first uses in art music, of exploring the horn’s introverted and extroverted qualities. The piston horns (cors á pistons) known to Gounod were simple, two-valve contraptions otherwise not too different from a Classical ‘French’ horn. The composer dedicated his six Mélodies to the horn maker Marcel Auguste Raoux, whose design helped players navigate some new tonal areas while encouraging the use of partially and fully closed notes where possible. Gounod’s melodies often venture into these new harmonic territories, occasionally pivoting with
surprising abruptness. The piano writing is operatic, elegant, and sometimes playful. His use of octave doublings (echoes of Schubert abound) allow its timbre to cut through the rich sonority of the horn without much effort. He makes great use of the horn’s kaleidoscope of sonorities, without ever venturing into the realm of special effects. Gounod treats the horn as a voice, and though these tunes were never intended to be joined with lyrics, it can be enlightening to imagine the timbres of certain vowels and consonants in these expressive melodic lines. The funereal Larghetto incorporates sinuous half-steps that on Raoux’s first generation of cors à pistons would embrace the halfclosed colors veiled by the hornist’s hand. The Andante cantabile is filled with open intervals and pastoral melodic lines, its opening theme hinting at a shepherd’s song. It floats elegantly from the key of F into the warm embrace of A-flat major, before gracefully landing once again onto its initial harmonic footing. The final Andante sostenuto makes full use of a more than two octave range, so that the horn’s colors seem to emanate from multiple voices. There are several places in which more veiled timbres seem to bring out the nostalgia of the melody. A tender and pious tone permeates this final piece, right down to its prayer-like conclusion. Le jeune pâtre breton berlioz In his influential treatise on instrumentation, Hector Berlioz separates the “horn” and “valved horn” into separate chapters. In his introductory remarks on the latter, he notes that “the timbre of the valved horn differs
a little from that of the ordinary horn; therefore, it cannot replace it altogether. I think it should be treated almost as a separate instrument, particularly suitable in furnishing good, sonorous, and energetic basses... It can also render melodies quite well, especially those moving mainly in the medium range.” This suitability is easy to detect in Gounod’s Mélodies, which venture into the tenor and baritone ranges of the instrument with enthusiasm. Most of these passages would have been all but impossible to render beautifully on a valveless horn, and these songs without words can be seen as validations for Raoux’s new and somewhat controversial instruments. For Le jeune pâté breton, Berlioz calls for a pure and rustic sonority, and while he does not clearly specify one or the other, the song could be played quite organically on the natural instrument, with its few accidentals being very appropriately shaded with partially and fully closed tones. This early song in four strophes describes, in first person perspective, the longing of a young shepherd after his distant love, “though the mountain lies between them.” An interesting duality emerges in the text, wherein the shepherd describes playing his own horn, and yet also notes hearing the plaintive song of his love in the distance. Who’s who between the two “voices” remains a touch unclear. The horn has long been associated in Western art music with both metaphorical and literal distance, and Berlioz experiments with both incarnations of this idea. He revisited this pastoral song on several occasions. Fifteen years after its composition, he included it in his cycle Wildflowers (fleurs de landes), and later adapted it for voice and orchestra. In that setting, he preserved the obligato
role for the horn, in fact dividing its part for two players, for reasons which will become clear after seeing the original. Even in this first iteration, the composer makes very specific indications regarding the use of style and sotto voce timbres, requesting that the performers invoke tones of naivety and youth. The theatrical staging, even in this chamber setting, was the composer’s idea. Kleine Blume hosokawa There is a realm in which an excitation from the scene within the intent, startling the mind’s ear through the attractions of dancing and singing, spontaneously arouses excitement in the audience — that is the wondrous flower. That is interest. That is excitement without intent. – Zeami Motokiyo In the Japanese N’oh tradition, the words of the master Zeami are revered above all. In his fifteenth century writings, he compares an actor’s work to “holding a mirror to a flower,” and the image of the blossom comes to represent in some instances a performance, and in others the performer themselves. The botanical theme is present in a number of Toshio Hosokawa’s works from the past decade, including his evocative horn concerto Moment of Blossoming, which can be seen as the progenitor of this solo piece titled, in the composer’s adopted German language, Kleine Blume. Speaking on the subject, Hosokawa notes, “To express musically the energy of a flower’s blossoming carries deep meaning. I perceive music as plant-like development and growth, and I wish to continue composing music with a different viewpoint
Program Notes cont. from that of European composers, who construct music architecturally. It is a special feature of this series that at the beginning of the piece there is one long sustained note in the middle register out of which develops the mother’s body from which is born a song (a fragment of melody) as the flower. This sustained note symbolizes the surface of a pond, and what is lower than the note symbolizes under the water, while what is higher symbolizes the world above the water. Then this note which is the flower grows from the womb of harmony lying dormant deep beneath the surface, and continues to rise toward the surface.” Here, the horn slowly begins to unfold from its central E-flat core. This opening is fully organic: pacing, dynamic, and range all grow in gradual amounts, at first by minuscule degrees. Microtones hover around the central pitch before broadening to half-steps and eventually to perfectly symmetrical tritones, like mirror images above and below the flower. The horn’s echo and closed timbres appear like vague reflections of the lotus image in the water’s surface. The “energy” within the flower’s growth is released with intensity and splendor in the work’s center, and then the whole process begins anew. When the opening material returns, it has undergone metamorphosis: a little brighter, a bit more restless, and, like everything in nature, changed by the passage of time. Spare Bedroom george Once, in the middle of an algorithmically generated playlist, I encountered a haunting
fragment of music that drove me immediately in search of its source... a simple, repetitive, innocent theme for strings, celesta, and horn... It was Morton Feldman’s music for a film... a sexual abuse drama set in 1960’s New York directed by Jack Garfein and starring his wife Caroll Baker, with a score by... I’ll let Feldman explain: “And so Copland wrote this film. It was a disaster, and he got the most money ever written for a film in film history. I think he got around a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. The film was called Something Wild. And that was funny, my encounter with orchestration for Hollywood: “My wife is getting raped, and all you can think of is a string quartet!” It would have been beautiful if he had left it alone! It would have been beautiful, so sad, the ambivalence. You don’ t know if the rape is in one key or in the other key, you know. The whole thing was so lovely and sad. The juxtaposition was kind of sad, tender thing, you know. He made a mistake. And the big mistake he made was that the rape took place — and this is how I got the idea — the rape took place after her church choral rehearsal.” When Whitney George showed me her score to Spare Bedroom, I was struck by how radically it transformed this visceral experience of sexual violence captured on film. Dutch artist Frans Zwartjes, whom Susan Sontag called “the most important experimental filmmaker of his generation” came to film after working as a violist, violin maker, and as a nurse in a psychiatric ward. Filmed in high contrast, overexposed black and white,
the film’s anonymous figures appear phantom-like and inhuman in his voyeuristic examination of their psychosexual interactions. Never departing from the confines of a single apartment, it is impossible to fully make sense of any passage of time in this “home sweet home,” despite the incessant repetition of a ticking watch. An interplay of seduction, fetishism, and repulsion turns violent and venomous. The rapidity of cuts between extreme closeups of porcelain faces and disorienting camerawork induces paranoia and confusion. Zwartjes did much of the editing “in-camera,” so its many starts and stops were rendered in analog fashion, giving the film the homemade quality of a still image slide reel: all the more disturbing in its domesticity. The original film score juxtaposes Mahlerian orchestral music against distorted cabaretlike jazz piano riffs, underscoring the imagery with a tone of irony, faux-sensuality, and theatricality. George’s score, by contrast, is cold and austere, yet alludes to a long tradition of piano accompaniments to silent films. The mechanical repetition of playerpiano cells, made subtly discomforting by their uneven rhythmic patterns, enhances the prison-like claustrophobia of the imagery. Against the inhuman backdrop of the piano, the horn plays an essential and complimentary role. The instrument’s sonority, rendered on old recorded film reels, has itself become a cinematic archetype. Here, George never allows the horn to succumb to romanticized gestures of heroism, masculinity, and nobility with which it is so often associated in Hollywood film scores. Instead, she asks the performer to assume the role of a concerned yet helpless bystander to a violent
and exploitative scene. Climaxes build alongside the overwhelming crescendo of realworld sounds made nightmarish: ticking clocks, unlocking doors, footsteps, and whispers. The horn, by the end, shields its own eyes and ears from what it has seen. Lamento della Ninfa monteverdi In the preface to his eighth published book of madrigals, Monteverdi is endearingly modest in his admission that some of his experiments may not work. “All beginnings are fragile,” he admits, conceding that later generations may build upon and perfect his innovations. He titled the collection Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi, dividing it into categories focusing on topics of war and of love, respectively. A small but crucial subtitle mentions “some works in the theatrical genre” (genre rappresentativo). These evocative Madrigals of Love and War capture what the composer observes as the three “dominant passions of the mind... Anger, Moderation, and Humility.” These passions are infused within the composer’s adaptation of a text from the Florentine poet Ottavio Rinuccini, the Lamento della Ninfa. This canzonetta is amorous in topic and unapologetically theatrical in its setting. In three parts, it involves only two characters: a nymph and a narrator. Monteverdi brilliantly sets the narrator’s words for a trio of tenor and bass: a late-Renaissance reflection of the choruses in Ancient Greek tragedy. They introduce the nymph’s circumstances (pale, grief-stricken face covered in tears... wandering about before dawn, treading on flowers... heaving deep sighs...) and conclude with a brief,
Program Notes cont. though evocative, reflection on her tragedy. Monteverdi inserts some surprising and visceral moments of dissonance to punctuate sonic images of deep sighs, and modulates from major to minor as he introduces the nymph. During the central lament – built over the obsessive, restricted repetition of a descending fourth in the basso continuo – the chorus occasionally interjects from the side, with pity, yet no help, for the agonizing soprano. The soprano line often strives upward, as though attempting to overcome the prison of her own grief embodied in the unwavering harmony. Her lines are sometimes mere fragments, and sometimes more continues, as though she is caught between breathless sighs and desperate, defiant declamations to the heavens. This central section became the archetypal lament, capturing grief so palpably in melody in harmony. Many composers would copy the technique in later works, in line with Monteverdi’s desire to improve upon these fragile beginnings. With his careful performance indications, the composer flirts with opera: a genre with which Monteverdi (along with Rinuccini, for that matter) was one of original experimenters. For the Nymph’s lament, he specifies that the soprano remain physically separate from the chorus, embodying her isolation. To further cultivate a sense of detachment, he asks the chorus to sing rigidly in time during the central aria, while noting that the soprano should allow emotions to infuse her rhythmic declamations with rubato (in other words, to sing it how they feel it). This lament conveys the torment of grief, emotional abuse, and jealousy against a backdrop of an unmoved and
helpless crowd. The horn is a multifaceted and chameleonic instrument, which Berlioz called “noble and melancholy.” It is so often associated with heroism and strength that I felt inspired to recapture its vulnerability through Monteverdi’s music. The Nymph’s Lament Ottavio Rinuccini Chorus of shepherds in Italics Nymph in standard font I. The god Phoebus had yet to light The great fires of the dawn When the nymph left her dwelling. Her face a pale temple in its ruins of grief; Her cries, wrenched from her heart. Here and there she went, Stumbling through flowers, Grieving the love she had lost: II. Hear me, oh love, she begged the heavens, – now stopped, rooted to the spot – What happened to that traitor’s vow, ‘Togetherness and trust’? I just want him back, But the way he was before. If it cannot be – then kill me, I cannot bear this agony. (The poor girl... no longer can she suffer this icy misery) No more will I listen to his sighs, Unless we are separated by a thousand seas No! No longer will I suffer for this. (Oh, the poor miserable creature)
I am destroying myself because of him, And the worse it is – the more I suffer – The more satisfied he seems. If I were to flee from him, Would he come begging to me? Her brow may be more perfectly arched than mine, But sealed within my breast, my love, Lives a faithfulness far more fair. And her mouth will never open To give kisses like mine! Hush! Say nothing, my love – you know all too well! III. With these cries she cast Her anguish to the heavens. And so it is that in the heart of every lover burns love’s fire and ice. Nisi ernste Nisí (νησί), the Greek word meaning “island.” In the end, that is where this musician finds himself, alone on stage with a microphone. The chorus is gone, or it seems to be, at least... Kevin Ernste dedicated this work to the Franco-Grecian composer and polymath Iannis Xenakis, himself one of music’s true islands. There was no one quite like Xenakis, who occupied his own category of mathematical-architectural-dramatic music: one which couldn’t really be taught. He incorporated elements of probability, geometry, and game theory into the principles of his music, which nevertheless comes across as remarkably human. Ernste invokes the spirit of Xenakis
by calling on the performer’s dramatic sensibilities. Physical gestures enhance the work’s sound world, and the musician becomes an actor in their own monodrama. The lone performer makes use of the real and artificial resonance of their physical space, casting their sound in outwardextending circles from the central “island.” In this theatrical treatment of sound and space, I am reminded of the architecture of those amphitheaters of the ancient world, with a terraced theatron rising from the performers’ space in a central orchestra. In the work, Ernste invokes Xenakis’s Eonta for piano and brass quartet, wherein the performers aim the bells of their instruments toward various points in space. N’shima – for a pair of amplified mezzo-sopranos, brass, and cello – provides a point of contact through Xenakis to the melodic content in Nisi. In both works, chant-like lines are interwoven with dramatic evocations of the Hebrew shofar and ritualistic fanfare. The horn’s introverted and extroverted colors and personalities, explored by everyone from Hector Berlioz to Kate Soper, are exploited within Nisi as well. From suffocated, halfvalved moans to strident horn calls across vast expanses, the performer creates their own acoustic environment almost entirely alone, save for the final re-emergence of a chorus. The disembodied voices that surround the horn in the work’s final episode are drawn from a single line in the ‘Nisi Dominus’ of Claudio Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers: in vanum laboraverunt. Labor in vain, they sing (apropos of a doctoral degree program in music, perhaps). The horn’s sound, rather than adapting and becoming lost in this phantom choir, instead resists its lure, with a discordant tone that never succumbs to external force.
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