“I try to create a totally different world with each piece,” remarked Missy Mazzoli in a recent interview about her work as composer-in-residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The world of Ecstatic Science is one of playful contrasts: between motion and stasis, fragments and complete gestures, and rule-bound systems and deviations from them. The piece opens with the strings holding long notes against pointillistic outbursts from the flute, clarinet, and trumpet; the resulting combination of articulations calls to mind, for this listener, an accordion or organ. As the work unfolds, the texture shifts until the wind instruments spin out sustained lines against pulsing rhythmic figures in the strings, and it continues to shift episodically for the remainder of the work, with soloists or groups of instruments trading roles from section to section. This ever-evolving landscape serves as an environment within which a wide array of ecstatic characters reveal themselves; the score’s expressive instructions run the gamut from “dry, matter of fact” to “sloppy, drunk” or “suddenly lyrical.” As Mazzoli herself says of the piece, “There’s a lot of math at play; chord progressions are drawn-out, multiplied, condensed, and layered. Melodies are flipped upside-down and fractured into the smallest possible elements. The horizontal becomes vertical, and the vertical stretches systematically into a twisting melody. The ‘science’ behind the notes provides a frame for a persistent, bubbling energy, a scaffold for the ecstatic gestures that eventually consume everything else.”
—Hamilton Berry
In his notes for The Complete Rags for Piano, William Bolcom recalls that his interest in ragtime music originated in 1967, when he heard about Scott Joplin’s opera Treemonisha (1911) from his friend Norman Lloyd, who was then head of the music division at the Rockefeller Foundation. After finally tracking down the vocal score with the help of his colleague Rudi Blesh at Queens College, Bolcom began an intense study of Joplin’s music and of the style of ragtime in general, ultimately taking lessons with pianist and composer Eubie Blake. “What may be less well-known,” Bolcom adds, “is that from about 1968 on, a whole group of young American composers—Peter Winkler, William Albright, and several others—joined me in writing new traditional-style rags ... Albright and I would send each other rags by mail like chess problems.”
The three rags on tonight’s program, which are all arranged by members of Decoda—a melancholic Graceful Ghost Rag, spooky The Poltergeist, and good-natured Incineratorag—each adhere to the traditional stylistic parameters of ragtime: duple meter; heavy syncopation in the treble register against an underpinning of regular eighth notes in the bass; and an alternation of three or four contrasting sections, or strains. Less traditional, however, is our orchestration of Bolcom’s solo piano scores for the unusual instrumentation of flute, clarinet, bassoon, violin, viola, and cello. These arrangements distribute the melodic and accompaniment elements of the rag playfully among the contrasting timbres of the ensemble, with the aim of preserving and accentuating the quirkiness and humor of the originals.
—Hamilton Berry
Steven Mackey is a composer who created his own idiom, incorporating the music he grew up with in the Northern California rock scene with his classical training. His sonic world is where timbre and tone quality diverge from traditional expectations and are tweaked and manipulated to produce something brand new.
His three-movement work Indigenous Instruments conjures up “folk music from a culture that doesn’t actually exist,” according to Mackey. From the first notes, we are plunged into a mysterious, yet seemingly joyful, dance made all the more strange by the de-tuning of nearly all instruments of the ensemble. The second movement provides a contemplative moment for the listener. The piano acts as a percussive element, almost as a structure for keeping time through our meditative journey. The sudden tonal cadence that signals the end of the movement is a striking moment, and our hypnosis is broken as we are ushered seamlessly into the third and final movement: a brooding, groovy jam that culminates in the shining clamor of the upper registers of the group. Perhaps the most distinctive sound in this last movement is the violin’s G string, which is tuned down a full octave plus a quarter tone. The composer writes, “I [was] waiting for inspiration until a UPS truck with its low moan and slow pitch-bend pulled into my driveway and I had a eureka moment. It was the counterpoint between that big, brown truck and that dark, funky cello part that led me to tune the [violin] G string down an octave.” We do not know what culture we are celebrating here, but as listeners, it is impossible not to be transported.
—Alicia Lee
Commenting on the “sacrilege” he had committed in altering Pergolesi’s original music for his pastiche masterpiece Pulcinella, Stravinsky famously quipped “you ‘respect,’ but I love.” Stravinsky had approached the arrangement of these Italian tunes as if they were a piece he had written and forgotten, freely adapting and translating the music into his own inimitable accent. He yoked the resulting music to a classic stock story and created a ballet.
When I pondered an approach to the arrangement of pieces by my favorite pre-classical composer—the mind-bendingly wild Jean-Philippe Rameau—I realized that faithful transcription was essentially off the table. With grand piano, modern strings, and contemporary winds, including clarinet and valve trumpet, the anachronisms could easily overwhelm the wacky majesty of the music as it is written. Instead, I found myself taking a similar approach that my hero had taken with Pulcinella (basic theft? homage?). In the process, I saw that I had created a suite from an imaginary ballet.
This music is based on instrumental music from Rameau’s operas, specifically Zaïs, Dardanus, and Les Boréades. The imagined ballet is based on a contemporary fairy tale that I loved as a child by Australian author Paul Jennings. In Jennings’s tale, a young lad falls desperately in love with an ice-sculpture of a maiden outside a fish shop. He abducts the ice princess and seals his love with a kiss, but his lips stick to the ice, and he is unable to ask for help, eliciting only guffaws from the townspeople. Ultimately, his only resort is to jump in the river, where the ice slowly melts. The boy almost drowns, but he is rescued by the fishmonger and his cousin, the latter being the very inspiration for the sculpture.
—Brad Balliett
The early career of Czech-born composer Bohuslav Martinů would have given little inkling of his future acclaim. An average violinist, he resisted practicing so much that he was actually dismissed from the Prague Conservatory in 1910 for “incorrigible negligence.” He blossomed in Paris during the 1920s and ’30s, where he sidestepped the aesthetic battles of the day by pursuing a Neoclassical approach. He later moved to the US, where he taught at the Mannes School of Music in New York, and where his students included, among others, Burt Bacharach.
La revue de cuisine (The Kitchen Revue) began its life as perhaps the only ballet ever written about cooking utensils. A tempest in a teapot, if you will, it involves a love triangle between Pot, Lid, and Twirling Stick, with Dishcloth and Broom as supporting roles. It was an immediate popular success in 1927, and Martinů took excerpts from a few numbers to create the suite we hear this evening.
The unique instrumentation is reminiscent of Stravinsky’s L’histoire du soldat, in which an unorthodox and skeletal chamber group transcends itself to suggest larger forces and ideas; while the scoring of L’histoire and La revue differ, they both include clarinet, trumpet, and violin. Stravinsky’s influence is also evident formally: syncopated and asymmetrical rhythms permeate the musical language, and Martinů blends traditional with popular dance forms. In the Tango, a sultry melody passes between cello, trumpet, and bassoon. The Charleston gradually picks up momentum, and pulls out all the stops emulating American jazz, which was all the rage in Paris in 1927.
—David Kaplan