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CAL PERFORMANCES 15 Thursday–Saturday, June 18–21, 2015 Faculty Glade, Hertz Hall, Zellerbach Hall Ojai at Berkeley is made possible, in part, by Patron Sponsors Liz and Greg Lutz. Cal Performances’ – season is sponsored by Wells Fargo. Ojai at Berkeley Steven Schick Music Director, Ojai Music Festival Thomas W. Morris Artistic Director, Ojai Music Festival Matías Tarnopolsky Director, Cal Performances featuring Steven Schick, percussion & conductor Beyond the Score® CalArts Sila Ensemble International Contemporary Ensemble Claire Chase, Artistic Director Joshua Rubin, Co-Artistic Director red fish blue fish Renga Gloria Cheng, piano Mellissa Hughes, soprano Jacob Nissly, percussion Joseph Pereira, percussion Vicki Ray, piano Wu Man, pipa Ojai at Berkeley is a co-production of the Ojai Music Festival and Cal Performances.

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Page 1: Ojai at Berkeleycpinfo.berkeley.edu/learn/program_notes/2014/pn_ojai.pdf · Claire Chase, Artistic Director Joshua Rubin, Co-Artistic Director red fish blue fish Renga Gloria Cheng,

CAL PERFORMANCES 15

Thursday–Saturday, June 18–21, 2015Faculty Glade, Hertz Hall, Zellerbach Hall

Ojai at Berkeley is made possible, in part, by Patron Sponsors Liz and Greg Lutz.Cal Performances’ 2014–2015 season is sponsored by Wells Fargo.

Ojai at BerkeleySteven Schick Music Director, 2015 Ojai Music Festival

Thomas W. Morris Artistic Director, Ojai Music FestivalMatías Tarnopolsky Director, Cal Performances

featuring

Steven Schick, percussion & conductor

Beyond the Score®

CalArts Sila Ensemble

International Contemporary EnsembleClaire Chase, Artistic Director

Joshua Rubin, Co-Artistic Director

red fish blue fish

Renga

Gloria Cheng, pianoMellissa Hughes, sopranoJacob Nissly, percussion

Joseph Pereira, percussionVicki Ray, pianoWu Man, pipa

Ojai at Berkeley is a co-production of the Ojai Music Festival and Cal Performances.

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PLAYBILL

Thursday–Saturday, June 18–20, 2015Faculty Glade, Hertz Hall, Zellerbach Hall

Ojai at Berkeley

FESTIVAL SCHEDULE

Thursday, June 18, 2015, 6pm Welcome: Cal Performances Artistic andFaculty Glade Executive Director Matías Tarnopolsky

Outdoor Concert: Sila: The Breath of the World

8pm Program 1: Beyond the Score®: A PierreDream—Zellerbach Hall Pierre Boulez: A Portrait and Debussy

Friday, June 19, 2015, 5pm Talk: Steven Schick and Claire Chase conductHertz Hall Patio an audience participation event to include Lei

Liang’s Trans

7pm Program 2: Presenting Steven SchickHertz Hall Xenakis, Stockhausen, Lang, Globokar, Auzet

10pm Program 3: Debussy, Boulez, works for pipaHertz Hall

Saturday, June 20, 2015, 11am Program 4: Messiaen, Ravel, BoulezHertz Hall

2:30pm Program 5: Boulez, BartókHertz Hall

5pm Community Response Panel: A conversation withHertz Hall Patio composer Jimmy Lopez, musicologist William

Quillen, conductor Lynne Morrow, andmusician Amy X Neuberg

8pm Program 6: Wolfe, Harrison, Chávez, Ginastera

On Saturday, June 20, lunch and dinner will be provided by Grace Street catering. Specially priced concert and meal packages are available. Pre-order today at calperformances.org.

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CAL PERFORMANCES

INTRODUCTION

A HARD RAIN…and what did you hear my blue-eyed son?I heard one hundred drummers whose handswere a-blazin’

Bob Dylan, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall”

IHAVE SPENT MY LIFE trying to understandgeometry. When I was a boy, the world

seemed gridded, contained: One square mileof Iowa farmland, a section of 640 acres. Mybrother Ed and I walked long rows of soy-beans on hot summer days, picking button-weed. Back and forth, reversing directionwhen we reached the end since the usableworld lay only inside the limits of the field. Afarmer squints at the horizon, but he wouldnever try to go there.

Later, when I heard violinists and celliststalk about “becoming one” with their instru-ments, I thought that they too were farmers,embracing a geometry that turned inward.But percussion was different. Contemporarypercussionists don’t have an instrument; wehave thousands of them. And though wemight hold a special gong or drum close, theway a cellist would her cello, becoming onewith a tuned saw blade or a suspended brakedrum could be perilous. Indeed, much ofwhat we play is junk: frying pans, steel pipes,hunks of wood—not the reassuring objects ofthe known musical world, but totems of anunmapped exterior.

As I walked those long rows of beans, Iimagined continuing the line, breakingthrough the boundaries. By the end of sum-mer I could be in Denver, maybe Californiaby Christmas. This new geometry—the longstraight line—became my model for percus-sion. Moving beyond the bounds of theknown and cultivated, a percussionist playsgongs, cymbals, cowbells, and bongos andthinks nothing of laying hands on four dis-tinct musical cultures. But a string quartet ofviolin, mandolin, sitar, and rebab flirts withculturally dangerous terrain. Percussioniststhink externally. We don’t expect the world toconform to music; we expect music to con-form to the world.

Eventually, the long straight line becamemore than a metaphor. One day, in the mostpurely Forrest Gump moment of my life, I sim-ply began walking. I left my house in La Jollaand headed north. Along the way, I bought abackpack, decent walking shoes, and a hat. Ihad two motivations. The first was to listen tothe entrancing noises of the California coast,from the rush of wind and water to rat-a-tat ofirrigation systems and the droning of traffic. Iwalked through Camp Pendleton and heardthe laughter of schoolchildren mingle with thebooms of cannon-fire. I passed the LotusEaters of Orange County, walked through themultilingual cacophony of south Los Angeles,and hugged the shoulder of Highway 1 alongthe Big Sur coast to San Francisco. The othermotivation was personal. The night I arrived,I took my girlfriend Brenda to a restaurant(with valet parking) and proposed.

How permeable are the boundaries betweenmusic and life! As we waited for Brenda’s car, Iremembered a small post-concert dinner inJune 1988 at the Warsaw apartment of JózefPatkowski. Patkowski had been president of thePolish Composers Union in the darkest days ofSoviet occupation and had fostered a lively mu-sical avant-garde in spite of enormous resist-ance. Our conversation about the role of musicin the stormy politics of that fateful summerwas mirrored by flashes of lightning on thehorizon. For a while we simply listened to thestorm approach. Then Patkowski slapped thetable. The food was ready, he said. Let’s talkabout life now, not art. Then he threw his headback and laughed as though such distinctionswere absurd. And the rains came.

© Steven Schick

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Thursday, June 18, 2015, 6pmFaculty Glade

Ojai at Berkeley

Sila: The Breath of the World

PROGRAM

John Luther Adams (b. 1953) Sila: The Breath of the World (2014)(Bay Area Première)

CalArts Sila Ensemble

with participating musicians from

International Contemporary Ensemblered fish blue fish

PLAYBILL

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CAL PERFORMANCES

ORCHESTRA ROSTER

CAL ARTS SILA ENSEMBLE

VIOLINDavid Bowlin (ICE)Erik Carlson (ICE)Hrabba Atladottir*Madeline Falcone

Emily CallMona Tian

VIOLAMaiya Papach (ICE)

Nanci Severance*Mark MenziesMelinda Rice

CELLOKivie Cahn-Lipman (ICE)

Judith Hamann*Elizabeth Brown*

Betsy Rettig

DOUBLE BASSRichard Worn*

Charles Carswell

FLUTEAlice Teyssier (ICE)Claire Chase (ICE)

Rachel RudichChristine Tavolacci

Sarah WassJennifer Ingertila

OBOENick Masterson (ICE)

Claire ChenettePaul ShermanJoseph Thel

CLARINET & BASS CLARINETJoshua Rubin (ICE)

Campell MacDonald (ICE)Brian WalshErnesto Cruz

BASSOONRebekah Heller (ICE)

Jonathan Stehney

HORNDavid Byrd (ICE)

Alicia Telford*Allen FogleAdam Wolf

TRUMPETJonah Levy

Brad Hogarth*Stephanie Richard*

Aaron SmithJessica WaitheMichael Rocha

TROMBONEBrendan Lai-Tong*

Kevin AustinCorey Hoeben

Jenna Hindi

TUBAPeter Wahrhaftig*

Luke Storm

PERCUSSIONNathan Davis (ICE)

Ross Karre (ICE)David Johnson

Anna WrayBrietta Greger

Leanna GoddardRobin Hirshberg

Leah Bowden (rfbf)Carlota Cáceres (rfbf)

Christopher R. Clarino (rfbf)Fiona Digney (rfbf)

Dustin Donahue (rfbf)Jason Ginter (rfbf)

Jonathan Hepfer (rfbf)Ryan Nestor (rfbf)

Kjell Nordeson (rfbf)Stephen Solook (rfbf)

SOPRANOMaria Elena AltanyKathryn Shuman

Micaela TobinMarja Liisa Kay

Adriana ManfrediAmy Golden

ALTOJacqueline Bobak

Lauren DavisCarmina Escobar

Sara GomezSharon Kim

Argenta Walther

TENORTimur BekbosunovMarc Lowenstein

BASSPaul Berkolds

Ian Walker

* Berkeley musician

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PLAYBILL

PROGRAM NOTES

Songs are thoughts which are sung out with thebreath when people let themselves be moved bya great force....

Orpingalik, a Netsilik elder

IN INUIT TRADITION, the spirit that animatesall things is sila, the breath of the world. Sila

is the wind and the weather, the forces of na-ture. But it’s also something more. Sila is in-telligence. It’s consciousness. It’s our awarenessof the world around us, and the world’s aware-ness of us.

Over the past four decades, most of mymusic has been inspired by the outdoors, butheard indoors. With Inuksuit—for nine to 99percussionists—I finally composed music in-tended from the start to be performed andheard outdoors. In Sila: The Breath of theWorld, I continue this exploration with a fullorchestral palette. Listening to music indoors,we usually try to ignore the outside world, fo-cusing our listening on a limited range ofsounds. Listening outdoors, we’re challengedto expand our attention to encompass a mul-tiplicity of sounds. We’re invited to receivemessages not only from the composer and theperformers, but also from the larger worldaround us.

In Sila, the musicians are dispersed widelythroughout a large performance space.Listeners, too, are free to move around anddiscover their own individual listening points.Listening carefully to the counterpoint be-tween the composed music of Sila and thenever-ending music of the performance site,we transform seemingly empty space intomore fully experienced place.Sila is intended for performance outdoors

by 16 to 80 musicians, or more. The perform-ance materials include scores and parts forfive different ensembles of woodwinds, brass,percussion, strings, and voices. These five en-sembles may perform Sila in any combina-tion, successively or simultaneously, in thesame space or separate spaces. At Ojai, for the

West Coast première, we presented the full or-chestral version of the piece.Sila comes out of the earth and rises to the

sky. The piece traverses 16 harmonic clouds,grounded on the first 16 harmonics of a lowB-flat. All the other tones in the music fall “be-tween the cracks” of the piano keyboard—offthe grid of twelve-tone equal temperament.

Like the tuning, the flow of musical time inSila is also off the grid. There is no conductor.Each musician is a soloist who plays or singsa unique part at her or his own pace. The se-quence of musical events is composed, but thelength of each event is flexible. Themusic breathes.

A performance of Sila lasts approximately70 minutes. There is no clearly demarcatedending. As the music of the performancegradually dissolves into the larger sonic land-scape, the musicians join the audience in lis-tening to the continuing music of the place.

© John Luther Adams

SIDEBAR: SCHICK ON SILA

Most composers start with a sound, or maybeonly an idea for a sound. John Luther Adamsstarts with noise—the totality of all sounds—and then removes everything that is not hismusic. In a noisy piece like the solo he wrotefor me, The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies,the noises are still there, unfiltered by theprocess of composition. I can hear ice crack-ing, electrical wires humming, my fathershouting as Harmon Killebrew belted one intothe Minnesota night. This is not poetry; I re-ally hear them. With Sila, though, the filter-ing is extreme. The discordant noise has beenremoved, and what remains is a fragile skeinof stacked harmonies. As John says, it is thebreath of the world. And, God help us, some-times it feels like the last healthy breath theplanet will draw.

© Steven Schick

SILA: THE BREATH OF THE WORLD

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Thursday, June 18, 2015, 8pmZellerbach Hall

Ojai at Berkeley

PROGRAM 1

beyond the score®

A Pierre Dream—Pierre Boulez: A Portrait

A Video and Musical Celebration of Pierre Boulez on the Occasion of His 90th Birthday

Produced by the Chicago Symphony OrchestraStage set designed by Frank Gehry

Creative direction by Gerald McBurney

International Contemporary Ensemble

red fish blue fishCarlota Cáceres, Christopher R. Clarino, Fiona Digney,

Dustin Donahue, Jonathan Hepfer, percussion

Mellissa Hughes, sopranoAnna Bowen, actress

Charlotte Cannon, Margaret Cook, Colin Creveling, Derek Herman, Joseph Galizia, Nyle Kenning, non-speaking actors

Josephine Chan, young pianistSteven Schick, conductor

Martha Gilmer, executive producerYasmine Kiss, production stage manager

Paul Deziel, projection design coordinator

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PLAYBILL

PROGRAM NOTES

A revolution must be dreamed quite as muchas engineered.

Pierre Boulez

THE DREAMS that spawned Pierre Boulez’srevolutions owe quite a lot to those of

Debussy, whose own revolutions abolishedharmonic hierarchies, subsumed rhythm intoa continuous flow, transformed the orchestrathrough new instrumental colors, and madeevery gesture seem the inspiration of the mo-ment. Debussy, Boulez has written, inaugu-rated “a conception of the relativity andnon-reversibility of musical time” and he didthis by having the courage “to rethink all as-pects of musical creation.” In short, Boulezwrites, “he had to dream his revolution firstbefore it could be realized.”

These nearly identical formulations regard-ing dreams and revolutions point to a per-ceived kinship that extends beyond thespecific qualities that fascinated Boulez aboutDebussy’s music. Both composers took animaginative leap into new worlds of sound,worlds that for Boulez had nothing to do withgauzy Impressionism, but rather bracing clar-ity and formal precision. These are the quali-ties that are distilled in Syrinx, a work whoseechoes can be heard in the works of Boulezfrom his early Sonatine to such later worksas Mémoriale.Syrinx, written in 1913, was conceived as in-

cidental music for an unfinished play byGabriel Mourey entitled Psyché. It evokes themyth of the chaste nymph Syrinx, who, pur-sued by Pan, is transformed into water reedsthat Pan then cuts to create a set of musicalpipes that would be known as syrinx or panpipes. This piece, the cornerstone of the mod-ern flute repertory, was dedicated to theflautist Louis Fleury, who established a tradi-tion of performing the work offstage or behinda screen. It was first published in 1927 in anedition by Marcel Moyse who is said to haveadded bar lines to the unbarred manuscript.

© Christopher Hailey

Gerard McBurney has provided the followingnotes to his own celebration of the dreams andrevolutions of Pierre Boulez:

There’s a paradox at the heart of the PierreBoulez story. On the one hand:

the infamously shocking and abrasiveideologue of 70 years of post-war mod-ernism, whose music is notoriously “dif-ficult,” and whose pronouncements are[mostly mis]remembered as aggressivelyprovocative and épater le bourgeois:

“Blow up the opera houses!”

“Schoenberg is dead!”

“The neoclassical music of Stravinsky iscompletely worthless!”

“Any musician who has not truly experi-enced the necessity of twelve-note musicis USELESS!”

And on the other:

the internationally loved conductor ofsymphony orchestras, the triumphantrecording artist, the peerless interpreterof Mahler and Stravinsky (includingmany of the latter’s neoclassical works!),champion of the operas of Wagner andDebussy, adored teacher, mentor andguide to generations of young orchestralmusicians, composers and conductors,and…of course, let’s not forget this!…source—to his many friends around theworld—of a cornucopia of funny stories,almost always delivered with a wickedtwinkle in the eye.

In other words, the Grand Old Manof music.

So who is he? The one, the other, or far farmore than both?

DREAMS AND REVOLUTIONS

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CAL PERFORMANCES

PROGRAM NOTES

This was the elusive question we set out toexplore as we launched ourselves into the cre-ation of A Pierre Dream (the title—so per-fect—was the invention of Frank Gehry).

Several of us in the team had had the ad-vantage of having been warmed by Pierre’sfriendship and support, especially over the pastten years and the growth of the Beyond theScore program. He watched over us most care-fully, attending shows when in Chicago, cri-tiquing scripts and music, questioning ourvisual choices and supporting us at the endwith his wonderfully terse “Bravo!” whichmade us all walk round with heads held higher.

It is always difficult to find an imaginativeway talk of an artist of one’s own time. But inone respect at least, the problem is made eas-ier nowadays, and especially with this partic-ular artist, by the vast growth in recorded andtransmitted media in the last half century:film, television, radio, newspapers and maga-zines, and now of course the Web.

Pierre Boulez is the most natural commu-nicator. In front of a camera, a microphone, aconcert or a lecture audience, a group ofyoung musicians or in the hallowed haunts oftop professionals and politicians, this is a manwho, at least since the 1960s, has never ceasedengaging other human beings, speakingFrench, German, and English with equal ease,and drawing us all into his passionate visionof a culture in which we all participate, and bywhich we are all lifted up.

As he puts it in A Pierre Dream:

If you have no culture, no desire of cul-ture, then your civilization is dying…simply that!

As we made this show, our first task was togather together hundreds of fragments ofPierre Boulez talking, writing, explaining, gar-nered from more than half a century of classes,interviews, documentaries and published arti-cles, and create from this a collage, a spider’sweb of thoughts and feelings which, gatheredtogether, might evoke the mind, heart and themusic of this extraordinary man.

Our second task was to go see his goodfriend Frank Gehry. As we tried to explainwhat we were aiming for, Frank quietly took anotepad and a pen and drew on it a startlingvision of mysteriously migrating projectionsurfaces, which he called ‘sails’ or ‘Romanbanners’, and which he imagined weaving inand out of the musicians.

He wrote the title at the bottom, thenpushed the paper across the table. We stam-mered thanks.

“Are you kidding?,” said Frank. “This isfor Pierre!”

© Gerard McBurneyChicago, March 10, 2015

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PLAYBILL

Friday, June 19, 2015, 7pmHertz Hall

Ojai at Berkeley

PROGRAM 2

Presenting Steven Schick

Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001) Rebonds (1987–1989)

Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007) Zyklus (1959)

David Lang (b. 1957) The Anvil Chorus (1991)

Vinko Globokar (b. 1934) ?Corporel (1985)

Xenakis Psappha (1975)

Steven Schick, percussion

INTERMISSION

Roland Auzet (b. 1964) La Cathédrale de Misère (2010)(Bay Area Première)

Staged version of Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate (1922–1932)

Steven Schick, percussionRoland Auzet, director

Wilfried Wendeling, technician

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CAL PERFORMANCES

PROGRAM NOTES

The thing Jesus really would’ve liked would bethe guy that plays the kettle drums in the or-chestra. I’ve watched that guy since I was abouteight years old. My brother Allie and I, if wewere with our parents and all, we used to moveour seats and go way down so we could watchhim. He’s the best drummer I ever saw. He onlygets a chance to bang them a couple of timesduring a whole piece, but he never looks boredwhen he isn’t doing it. Then when he does bangthem, he does it so nice and sweet, with thisnervous expression on his face.

J. D. Salinger, A Catcher in the Rye

HOLDEN CAULFIELD could spot a phony amile away, but this guy—the kettledrum

player—this was the real deal. And just bywatching he could tell. By watching. There’ssomething about percussionists. They’ll playanything and anything they play—a drum, atriangle, a xylophone, gong, a tin pan—createsits own special ballet, sound made visible.Bang, brush, stroke, caress—things we our-selves do all the time—become acts of magic,conjuring speech from wood, metal, skin, orout of thin air. Steven Schick is just such a con-jurer of sight and sound and this concert is acelebration of those physical acts of makingmusic, of the choreography of sound. It is alsoa concert about the way the objects of ourphysical environment can spring into resonantlife, transforming our very notions of whatmusic can be.

Iannis Xenakis, architect and composer,philosopher and political activist, wrote twoworks for solo percussion. Rebonds is in twomovements (A and B) to be played attaca inany order. Movement A uses only drums—bongs, tom-toms, and bass drums, whereas Badds to these instruments wood blocks and atumba. Psappha (“Sappho” in archaic Greek) iswritten for six instrumental groups dividedbetween wood and/or skin (i.e. drums) andmetal instruments—the precise selection leftto the performer—so that, according toXenakis, “timbre serves only to clarify the

rhythmic structures.” Stockhausen’s Cycle fora Percussionist, the earliest work on this con-cert and the inspiration for an entire genera-tion of solo percussion works, calls for batteryof Western and non-Western instrumentsranged around the performer. The graphicscore, which contains both fixed and open el-ements, allows the performer to start at anypoint and proceed until the cycle is complete.

David Lang’s The Anvil Chorus was in-spired by the way medieval blacksmiths sangsongs to control the beat patterns of the hammers. Here the melody is performed onresonant junk metals that “trigger an odd ac-companiment of non-resonant junk metals,played both by hand and by foot.”

Vinko Globokar’s background in jazz hasmade improvisation and theatrical perform-ance a central component of his work. In?Corporel, the percussionist body is the in-strument (and object) of various percussiveassaults, augmented by largely wordless vo-calization, with the exception of one passage:“I recently read the following remark: ‘Humanhistory is a long sequence of synonyms for thesame word. It is our duty to disprove this.’” If?Corporel is about the limit of language it is it-self highly expressive. The idea, Globokar haswritten, “was to find something new. But evenif you didn’t find this end result, it was stillokay, because you were exploring ideas.”

New language was also a preoccupationfor the Dadaist collage artist Kurt Schwitters,who composed his essay in sound poetry,Ursonate (“Primeval Sonata”), as a piece ofpersonal performance art. It is structured inthe four movements of a classical sonata witha first part in modified sonata form (includ-ing exposition, a series of developments, anda coda), followed by a Largo, Scherzo, andPresto finale, also in sonata form, though withan extended freely improvised cadenza and acoda consisting of a Dada poem based on theGerman alphabet. Roland Auzet describes histheatrical adaptation of the piece as an inte-rior monologue of extreme alienation inspired

BODY LANGUAGE

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PLAYBILL

PROGRAM NOTES

by the Japanese phenomenon of the reclusive“hikikomori,” who lead lives of complete so-cial withdrawal:

A man harassed by his time, decides notto leave home ever again. He piles up, he listens, he builds himself a language…a cathedral…of privation. Hidden away in hishome, behind a wall of speakers and moni-tors, he plays over and over obsessing picturesand surfs the World Wide Web. From behindhis keyboard, he never ceases to call out to uson who he really is. Shouting his strange per-sonality and detailing as a matter of urgencythe multiple metamorphoses that turned himinto this physical and psychological cock-roach. We will gradually discover that as aman he is utterly deconstructed and, not having truly understood the human he was,or indeed might be, he took refuge in themany roles and faces he chose for others. Thisman is an error message, a poorly controlledchain reaction.

© Christopher Hailey

SIDEBAR: X IS FOR XENAKIS

As Borges wrote of Franz Kafka, IannisXenakis was so important that he influencedeven those who came before him. Most ofwhat I know about percussion and much ofwhat I understand about music come fromXenakis. When I recently conducted theBerlioz Requiem, the swirling brass of theTuba Mirum reminded me of Eonta, not theother way around.

Xenakis was the combustible combinationof modern rationality and ageless mythology.He was simultaneously the architect of the1958 Philips Pavilion and, in his own words,an ancient Greek exiled to the 20th century.These oblique vectors of modernity and an-tiquity comprise his “X,” and explain the mo-ments of intense luminosity and terriblesorrow in his music. The X helps me under-stand the impossible passages of Xenakis. Mostof his music is fiercely difficult, but in everypiece, at a formally critical juncture, there issomething truly unplayable. The sudden ap-pearance of impossible music demands a per-sonal not just a musical solution. And as aplayer suddenly grapples with the inconceiv-able, the mask falls. Carefully constructedmusic becomes molten. And a performer, fan-cying himself an accomplished artist, unex-pectedly finds himself naked and human.

© Steven Schick

OJAI at BERKELEY TALKS

JOIN Steven Schick and Claire Chase for an audience participationevent that includes Lei Liang’s Trans on the Hertz Hall patio at 5pm.

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CAL PERFORMANCES

Friday, June 19, 2015, 10pmHertz Hall

Ojai at Berkeley

PROGRAM 3

Edgard Varèse (1883–1965) Density 21.5 (1936; rev. 1946)

Claire Chase, flute

Pierre Boulez (b. 1925) Dialogue de l’ombre double (1984)

Joshua Rubin, clarinet

Wang Huiran (b. 1935) Dance of the Yi People (1960)

Kazakh traditional (arr. Wu Man) Küi

Wu Man (b. 1963) Night Thoughts

Wu Man Leaves Flying in Autumn

Wu Man, pipa

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PLAYBILL

PROGRAM NOTES

EDGARD VARÈSE, like Debussy, reconceivednotions of musical time and space, but his

dreams and revolutions were fed by a very dif-ferent set of impulses. He was 33 when he ar-rived in New York in 1915. Here he confronteda new world of pulsing modernity in whichurban soundscapes and modern science pro-vided him with the impetus to challenge con-ventional notions of conflict and resolutionbased on the goal-oriented properties of tonalharmony. In this pursuit, percussion instru-ments—later augmented by electronic re-sources—took on a central role in creating anew conception of musical logic in which“sound masses” defined by timbre and regis-ter, rhythm and texture might cluster, collide,drift apart and interpenetrate. Like Debussy,Varèse is thus a composer very much associ-ated with the alchemy of his instrumentalcombinations, which makes a comparison oftheir two works for solo flute—Syrinx andDensity 21.5—all the more interesting.

Varèse certainly had Syrinx in mind whenhe wrote his piece for Georges Barrère, aflutist closely identified with the Debussywork; indeed, Varèse later suggested that thetwo works should be performed together, al-though their aesthetic orientation could notbe more different: the one a programmaticevocation of an ancient myth, the other, itstitle drawn from the density of platinum of thenew platinum flute, a seemingly dispassionatemeditation on the material properties ofsound. But as Carol Baron has pointed outSyrinx might well have served as a model forDensity 21.5 beginning with the identical mo-tivic cells that open each work: a falling minorsecond, followed by a rising major second (F–E–F-sharp in Varèse, B-flat–A–B inDebussy). To be sure the Varèse piece is sig-nificantly more “advanced” with the intro-duction of percussive key clicks, extremeregisters, and abrupt dynamic contrasts, butboth works share a preoccupation with staticharmonic blocks and the symmetrical divi-sions of the octave through whole-tone pitchcollections and an emphasis upon the inter-vals of the minor third and the tritone.

If composers communicate and interact witheach other through their music, it is no less truethat a composer’s own works represent a collo-quium of musical preoccupations. PierreBoulez’s œuvre is an extreme example: a tangleof interrelationships in which one work in-evitably begets another through revision, ex-tension, and transformation. “The differentworks that I write,” he once observed, “are basi-cally no more than different facets of a singlecentral work, with a central concept.” Dialoguede l’ombre double, composed in honor ofLuciano Berio on the occasion of his 60th birth-day, is extracted from a large piece, Domaines(1968–1969). It was inspired by a scene in PaulClaudel’s play Le Soulier de satin (1924) inwhich a double shadow of a man and a womanis cast upon a wall to become a single character.Boulez took this idea to create a work of spatialtheater in which a live clarinet soloist performssix strophes in an order of his choosing in al-ternation with prerecorded segments of ashadow clarinet heard over six loudspeakers inever-shifting combinations and abruptly vary-ing dynamic levels that send sound cascadingaround the audience. Boulez further calls forlighting effects that heighten the disorientingaural impression of the shadow clarinet.

Both the clarinet and keyed flute are mod-ern iterations of ancient reed instruments.The pipa, on the other hand, has an unbrokenhistory that goes back at least two millennia.This four-string instrument (usually tuned A–D–E–A), a member of the pear-shaped lutefamily with cousins around the globe rangingfrom the sitar to the balalaika, biwa, man-dolin, and oud, has changed little in outwardappearance although the number of frets hasincreased from the original four to as many as30 and by the 1950s nylon-wound steel stringshad replaced traditional silk strings with theresult that players now use false nails. Thesetwo developments, which have given the instrument both a chromatic scale and abrighter, more penetrating tone, have facili-tated the pipa’s integration with Western in-struments, as one hears in the Lou Harrisonconcerto programmed on Saturday evening.

DIALOGUES AND SHADOWS

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As a solo instrument the pipa, which had itsgreatest era of popularity during the Tang dy-nasty (AD 618–907), evolved in two main tra-ditions in the North and South of China, aswell as two principal styles: civil (wen), whichis softer and more lyrical, and martial (wu),which is more rhythmic, faster, and makesgreater use of percussive sound effects and var-ious kinds of pitch modification. Five schoolsemerged from these two traditions, each asso-ciated with a particular body of works andeach with its own notational system passeddown through a succession of masters.

Contemporary pipa players have tended tosynthesize the various performing traditionswhile adding new techniques adapted fromWestern performance practice that has madeit possible to integrate the pipa into contem-porary and even rock music with the intro-duction of the electric pipa. Wu Man has beenat the forefront of bringing the pipa toWestern audiences and has commissioned nu-merous solo and ensemble works withWestern instruments. Here, too, she has cre-ated a space for dialogue between the longshadow of tradition and the inexorable mo-mentum of stylistic evolution.

© Christopher Hailey

SIDEBAR: WALKING TO WEN-CHUNG

On a cold, clear, late fall day in 1975—myfirst day in New York City and the fifth happi-est of my life—I walked from my friend’sapartment near Columbia University down theentire length of Manhattan to stand in front ofEdgard Varèse’s house in SoHo. Years later, Itold that story to the venerable composerChou Wen-chung, the current occupant of thehouse and Varèse’s one-time protégé. He said,“Next time, ring the doorbell!” Since then, Ihave rung the bell many times. Wen-chungand I have sat together in his living room as hedescribed his first composition lesson withVarèse. (“He was there at the piano, I sat whereyou are now....”) We talked about music andcalligraphy in the upstairs library while Idusted Wen-chung’s collection of gongs, oneof which belonging to Varèse himself.

We are friends.On that day 40 years ago, I fell in love with

New York and reveled in her noises: the fa-mous sirens, the low booms, and metal-on-metal cacophony of Manhattan underconstruction. But, even to an Iowa farm boy,these sounds were not new. I had already heardthem in the raucous joy of Ionisation and theanguished cries of Déserts. To me the worldsounds like Varèse. As we perform tonightwe’ll be thinking about you, Wen-chung!Someday soon I’ll ring the bell on the SullivanStreet. I’ll dust your gongs and we’ll talk.

© Steven Schick

Wang Huiran’s Dance of the Yi People (1960) isa signature piece in Wu Man’s repertoire. Wangbased his piece on folk tunes of the Yi minor-ity people of southwestern China. Wu Man se-lected it for her Beijing Conservatory auditionin 1978 and won first place; her performancewas broadcast throughout the nation. Sincethen, it has become one of the most popularpieces in the pipa repertoire, the first to incor-porate a Western A–B–A structure, adoptWestern chording, and display such virtuosotechniques such as tremolos, strumming, slid-ing notes, and harmonics. The pipa is believedto have entered China long ago through con-tact between Chinese civilization and the peo-ples that ancient Chinese sources described as“northern barbarians,” which is to say, nomads.Kazakhstan shares a long border with westernChina, and nomadic Kazakhs have long repre-sented an ethnic minority in China’s Xinjiang-Uyghur Autonomous Region. Wu Man hasarranged Küi, a Kazakh folk tune performedon the dombÿra, the two-stringed lute that iswidely regarded as a cultural symbol of theKazakhs, for pipa, bringing her instrument fullcircle, back to its Central Asian origins. HerNight Thoughts was inspired by a twelfth-cen-tury painting of a pipa player in Dun Huangcave in western China. She composed the im-provisational collage Leaves Flying in Autumnseveral years ago with inspiration from theclassical martial style of pipamusic and with anod to rock ’n’ roll.

Opus 3 Artists

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Saturday, June 20, 2015, 11amHertz Hall

Ojai at Berkeley

PROGRAM 4

Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992) Visions de l’Amen (1943)

I. Amen de la créationII. Amen des étoiles, de la planète a l’aneau

III. Amen de l‘agonie de JésusIV. Amen de désirV. Amen des anges, des saints, du chant des oiseaux

VI. Amen du jugementVII. Amen de la consommation

Gloria Cheng, pianoVicki Ray, piano

INTERMISSION

Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé (1913)I. Soupir

Pierre Boulez (b. 1925) Improvisation sur Mallarme I:Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui (1957)

Ravel Trois poèmes de Stéphane MallarmeII. Placet futile

Boulez Improvisation sur Mallarme II:Une dentelle s’abolit (1957)

Ravel Trois poèmes de Stéphane MallarméIII. Surgi de la croupe et du bond

Mellissa Hughes, sopranoInternational Contemporary Ensemble

red fish blue fishSteven Schick, conductor

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Everything that is sacred and that wishes to re-main so must envelop itself in mystery.

Stéphane Mallarmé

MAURICE RAVEL, OLIVIER MESSIAEN, andPierre Boulez represent three genera-

tions that have transformed French musicalculture over the past century, but the essentialrevolutions represented by their music tookplace over just a few decades, as one can hearin the works on this program, written between1913 and 1957. And it is not merely a trans-formation of style. It is also in the nature ofthe sacred mysteries their music invokes. Visions de l’amen explores two themes thatwould dominate Messiaen’s creative life:Catholic mysticism and Nature as an expres-sion of divine creation. These seven “musicalvisions,” scored for two pianos, explore thefour meanings of Amen: as an act of creation(movements 1 and 2); as acceptance of divinewill (3); as a desire for union with God (4);and as a symbol divine judgment (6) and eter-nal consummation (5, 7). The prevailing tonalcenter is A, which Messiaen associated withthe color blue, the color of the sky and symbolof eternity.

The two pianos are given separate func-tions. The first, written for the work’s dedica-tee, Yvonne Loriod, Messiaen’s student andfuture wife, features brilliant passage work andcomplex rhythmic patterns, many derivedfrom Indian tâlas and ancient Greek poeticmeters. The second piano part, whichMessiaen wrote for himself, presents the prin-cipal themes, including a Theme of Creation,heard in movements 1, 3, 5, and 7. The fol-lowing remarks are adapted from Messiaen’sown notes on the work:Amen of Creation: It begins pianissimo in

the mystery of the primeval nebula which al-ready contains the potential of light. All thebells quiver in this light—light and there-fore life.Amen of the Stars, of the Ringed Planet: A

savage and brutal dance. The stars, suns and

Saturn, the planet with its multicolored rings,rotate violently.Amen of the Agony of Jesus: Jesus alone in

the Garden of Gethsemane, face to face withhis death agony. Three musical motives: thecurse of the Father on the sins of the world; acry; a heart-rending lament on four notes invarious rhythms.Amen of Desire: The word Desire must be

taken in its highest spiritual sense. The firsttheme is slow, ecstatic, and yearning with deeptenderness; the second theme is much morevehement, in which the soul is drawn by a ter-rible love that attains the paroxysm of thirst.In the coda, the two principal voices seem tomerge into each other, and nothing remainsbut the harmonious silence of Heaven....Amen of the Angels, the Saints, and

Birdsong: First the song of the Angels andSaints, stripped of inessentials and very pure;then the songs of the Blackbird, Finch, andBlackcap mingled with the thousand voices ofnature in a turbulent yet smiling mixture.Amen of the Judgment: An intentionally

short and harsh piece.Amen of the Consummation: The second

piano takes up the Theme of Creation whilethe first piano surrounds it with a ceaselesscarillon of chords and brilliant, scintillatingrhythms: sapphire, emerald, topaz, jacinth,amethyst, sard, the entire rainbow of preciousstones of the Apocalypse that ring, collide, anddance—color and perfume of the light of life.

One might imagine Olivier Messiaen, withties to both Ravel and Boulez, as a kind of linkbetween the two, but in fact these two com-posers seem more directly related to eachother than to Messiaen, not least for theirshared love of the poetry of StéphaneMallarmé. “I consider Mallarmé not merelythe greatest French poet, but the only Frenchpoet…,” Ravel wrote, “he released wingedthought, subconscious reveries, from theirprisons.” In “Soupir” (Sigh) a wonderfully del-icate melody floats over a discreetly atmos-pheric accompaniment of string glissandi and

MYSTERIES

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arpeggios. The woodwinds and piano aremore prominent in the languid of “Placetfugile” (“Vain Petition”). A piccolo and a bassclarinet extend the registral range in “Surgi dela croupe et du bond” (“Risen from the crup-per and the leap”), an enigmatic meditationon an empty vase.

“It is the job of poetry,” Mallarmé oncewrote, “to clean up our word-clogged realityby creating silences around things”—an ideathat would have appealed to Pierre Boulez ashe composed his two improvisations onMallarmé. Improvisation I, for soprano andseven instrumentalists, uses only fragments of

Mallarmé’s sonnet “Le vierge, le vivace et le belaujourd’hui” (“The virginal, the living and thelovely today”). Improvisation II is based on thesonnet “Une dentelle s’abolit” (“A lace van-ishes”) and contrasts unpitched percussion in-struments with those with fixed and partiallyfixed pitches. These two works were later in-corporated into a still larger orchestral workinspired by Mallarmé, Pli selon pli, but it is intheir original pairing and scoring that these“improvisations” best capture the intimatemysteries of Mallarmé’s verse.

© Christopher Hailey

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Saturday, June 20, 2015, 2:30pmHertz Hall

Ojai at Berkeley

PROGRAM 5

Pierre Boulez (b. 1925) Dérive 2 (2009 version)

International Contemporary EnsembleSteven Schick, conductor

INTERMISSION

Béla Bartók (1881–1945) Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, Sz. 110, BB 115 (1937)

I. Assai lento — Allegro troppoII. Lento, ma non troppo

III. Allegro non troppo

Gloria Cheng, pianoVicki Ray, piano

Joseph Pereira, timpaniSteven Schick, percussion

OJAI at BERKELEY TALKS

JOIN the Ojai at Berkeley community response panel with composerJimmy Lopez, musicologist William Quillen, conductor Lynne

Morrow, and musician Amy X Neuberg on the Hertz Hall patio at 5pm.

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I find it wonderful to think that the material infact composes with you, and you compose withthe material. It’s an exchange.

Pierre Boulez

IN DISCUSSING HIS MUSIC, Pierre Boulez fre-quently refers to its “material,” the substance

of the ideas from which his works are derived.In a recent interview with Wolfgang Schauflerhe observed, “I look at what I’ve done, and Isay: but with this material, I could do farmore.” Dérive 1 and Dérive 2 exemplify thisprocess: “Derive 1 is derived from the mate-rial I used for Répons, and I still have a lot ofmaterial I wrote for Répons which is unused....I wrote [Dérive 2] because the material wasthere, and because I asked myself what Iwould do with this material. I am very practi-cal, so I don’t like to invent something whichgets lost. It’s that simple.”Dérive 1 has the feel of a brief, airy improv-

isation. Dérive 2 on the other hand, is a dense,complex work extending to three quarters ofan hour. It shares with Dérive 1 the same basicharmonic material based on the pitches ofPaul Sacher’s surname—E-flat–A–C–B–E–D,heard in six chordal permutations—but thecentral preoccupation of Dérive 2 is whatBoulez calls “periodicity,” that is, the kind ofcyclic return of material, “its overlays, its shiftsand its exchange,” that he found in some of theworks of György Ligeti. Indeed, Dérive 2makes explicit references to fragments fromworks by both Carter and Ligeti, althoughthese references are scarcely audible.

In Dérive 2 strict rhythmic and canonicforms are interrupted by freer forms. At theoutset a manic kaleidoscope of textures andcolors dance over the basically static harmony.Toward the middle of the piece the interrup-tions, at first quite short, become progressivelylonger, creating and expansive, even lyricalmood. Toward the end the strict structures re-turn but more freely than in the first half. Thework’s extended coda was conceived years ear-lier, but held back: “…sometimes you think of

the end long before the rest of the piece. Andtherefore I keep it in reserve.”

The scoring of Dérive 2 exploits the contrastand interaction between three string instru-ments, four woodwinds (oboe, clarinet, bas-soon, and horn), and two sets ofpercussion—piano and harp, marimba and vi-braphone. Written for Elliott Carter’s 80thbirthday in 1988,Dérive 2was revised in 2006and 2009, when it reached its definitive form:“I discovered a way of structuring,” Boulez re-called, “of composing the work which was to-tally different than what I had done up to thatpoint, a sort of narrative aspect of the work. Itwas then that I saw that this narration was fin-ished, and that I could not add anything—theaddition would have been totally artificial.”

For Béla Bartók, the material of his compo-sitions was derived from the way sound de-lineates structure. The Sonata for Two Pianosand Percussion treats its pitched and un-pitched percussion instruments as vehicles toexplore a realm of rhythmic nuance, subtleshadings of attack and decay, and above allcolor. The first of its three movements, an ex-tended sonata form, is by far the longest andmost complex. Roy Howat has related thatBartók described the slow introduction, whichbegins with a mysterious timpani roll and awinding chromatic theme in the pianos, as “acosmos evolving out of formlessness andtimelessness.” It is an image that aptly de-scribes Bartók’s sense for a musical architec-ture that often traces an arch, rising insuccessive waves to a climax and subsidingback into nothingness. This is music thatworks by accretion. Clearly defined motivesand themes are restated, gradually lengthenedor embellished, often through canonic imita-tion, fugal elaboration, or the addition of par-allel voices at various intervals.

As in much of Bartók’s later music, the pro-portions of the sonata’s individual sections

reflect the principle of the golden section—those patterns found throughout the natural world that can be represented by such

MATERIAL DIFFERENCES

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mathematical formulas as the Fibonacci seriesin which each number is the sum of its twopredecessors, thus: 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc.Although these are not proportions one nec-essarily hears, Bartók’s musical landscape isplanted thick with sonic signposts—a fortis-simo here, the introduction of a new instru-ment there—to demarcate moments ofstructural significance. One such moment isthe extended climax of this movement, whichis marked by the dogged, ostinato-like repeti-tion of the motive heard at the opening of theintroduction.

The Lento is a straightforward ternary archform with a coda, though here the conclusionbrings a fuller and still more colorful restate-ment of the original material. In the first move-ment the percussion serves mainly to articulatestructural design; in this movement it providesan atmosphere of evocative mystery, a splendidexample of Bartók’s night music texture.

Although Bartók’s music is strictly speak-ing tonal—this sonata, for instance, might besaid to be in the key of C—it is a tonality in

which the principal harmonic polarity is oftenthe tritone rather than the dominant fifth (inthis case C–F-sharp rather than C–G). This isa reflection of the composer’s fascination withsymmetrical relationships (the tritone dividesthe octave in equal halves) which also explainshis love for modal scales, such as the Lydian(the scale from F to F on the white keys), thatcontain similar properties.

The last movement, a sonata-allegro formthat hints at a rondo, is relatively short andstraightforward. It has the joyous verve of apeasant dance with numerous rhythmic andstructural allusions to the Eastern Europeanfolk music that Bartók had studied so closely asan ethno-musicologist. Here, the percussion,most prominently the xylophone, is directlyinvolved in generating thematic material andenters into a true partnership with the piano.The movement ends “not with a bang but awhimper”—a long timpani diminuendo—amaster stroke of witty understatement.

© Christopher Hailey

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Saturday, June 20, 2015, 8pmHertz Hall

PROGRAM 6

Julia Wolfe (b. 1958) Four Marys (arr. for string orchestra) (1991)

RengaSteven Schick, conductor

Lou Harrison (1917–2003) Concerto for Pipa with String Orchestra (1997)

I. AllegroII. a. Bits and Pieces: Troika

b. Bits and Pieces: Three Sharingc. Bits and Pieces: Wind and Plumd. Bits and Pieces: Neapolitan

III. Threnody for Richard LockeIV. Estampie

Wu Man, pipaRenga

Steven Schick, conductor

INTERMISSION

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Carlos Chávez (1899–1978) Toccata for Percussion (1942)

I. Allegro, sempre giustoII. Largo

III. Allegro un poco marziale

red fish blue fishChristopher R. Clarino, Fiona Digney, Dustin Donahue, Jason Ginter,

Jonathan Hepfer, Steven Schick, percussion

Alberto Ginastera (1916–1983) Cantata para América Mágica, Op. 27 (1960)

I. Preludio y canto a la auroraII. Nocturno y canto de amor

III. Canto para la partida de los guerrerosIV. Interludio fantasticoV. Canto de agonia y desolación

VI. Canto de la profecia

Gloria Cheng, pianoNathan David, percussion, ICEJacob Greenberg, celesta, ICE

Mellissa Hughes, sopranoRoss Karre, percussion, ICE

Jacob Nissly, percussionJoseph Pereira, timpani

Vicki Ray, pianored fish blue fish

Leah Bowden, Carlota Cáceres, Christopher R. Clarino, Fiona Digney, Dustin Donahue,Jason Ginter, Jonathan Hepfer, Ryan Nestor, Kjell Nordeson, Stephen Solook, percussion

Steven Schick, conductor

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TIME AND SPACE are the latitude and longi-tude of composition, the conceptual and

physical dimensions by which a composer ori-ents and organizes sound. But these purely abstract dimensions are only the starting pointbecause music is always complicated and enriched by memory and association—thoseof the composer as well as the listener—and itis in this regard that the works on this concertoffer fascinating points of comparison for thediffering ways in which these four composersposition their works within a wide range ofcultural and historical coordinates.

Julia Wolfe, whose Anthracite Fields wonthe 2015 Pulitzer Prize for composition, haslong been interested in folk music, especiallyin an around her native Pennsylvania, thoughin her own works those traditions are often fil-tered through rock rhythms and textures, andminimalist techniques. Four Marys, writtenfor the Cassatt Quartet, “takes the soundworld of the mountain dulcimer and magni-fies it—the sliding pitches, the crude cryingtone, the drone strings, and the ‘strumming’expand throughout the quartet.” The workproceeds in a single dramatic arc, from quietsustained sonorities over a bass drone towardincreasingly differentiated articulation andrhythmic activity until, near the end, a plain-tive melodic line emerges to provide an ex-traordinary sense of emotional release.

Lou Harrison loved crossing musical bor-ders, but not to send “exotic” postcards or pre-pare ethnographic tracts. His global sensibilitywas delightfully elastic, treating every “Other”as a neighbor from whom one might borrownot a cup of flour, but a rhythm, a tuning, or atimbre. To be sure, Asian music and instru-ments were principal ingredients of his auralimagination, but his compositional recipeswere entirely his own. In his Concerto for Pipawith String Orchestra, written for Wu Man, hedoesn’t treat the pipa as a “traditional” instru-ment, but as a discovery, a protean prodigy ca-pable of slipping in and out of any number ofmusical environments—from the percussive

thickets of Three Sharing to the Aeolian gladesof Wind and Plumb, from a Neapolitan sere-nade to the hushed reverence of Threnody. Inthe extended finale, Harrison sends his soloistdown the medieval Silk Road to join withother travelers in a rousing estampie, followed,no doubt, by a hearty stew of a most mysteri-ous provenance.

The music of Carlos Chávez draws uponsources closer to home, including Mexicanfolk music and indigenous Indian elementsfrom his own Creole background. As a com-poser, conductor, author, and organizer he wasa central figure of Mexican cultural national-ism while at the same time forging importantlinks to European and North American mu-sical modernism. The primary intersection forthese interests and influences was rhythm andpercussion, for which his Toccata forPercussion serves as an outstanding example.The work was commissioned in 1942 by JohnCage for his own percussion ensemble, which,however, proved unable to cope with thework’s extended drum rolls (the première tookplace in 1948 with members of the OrquestraSinfónica de México).Toccata for Percussion is written for six play-

ers performing on both standard and indige-nous percussion instruments. The outermovements, which are in modified sonataform, feature a battery of drums in a virtuosodisplay of interlocking rhythmic patterns thatintroduce extended techniques such as cover-ing the drum heads with chamois cloth. Thecentral Largo is rhythmically more straight-forward and contrasts nonpitched metal in-struments with the pitched glockenspieland xylophone.

Like Chávez, Alberto Ginastera incorpo-rated folk and indigenous musical sources inhis music in a wide-ranging œuvre that in-cludes concert works in most genres, ballet,opera, and film music. In his later years,Ginastera sought to synthesize these elementswith twelve-tone and serial procedures as inhis Cantata para América Mágica (1960). This

COORDINATES

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work for dramatic soprano and a large per-cussion orchestra sets poems by Ginastera’sfirst wife, Mercedes de Toro, that are inspiredby pre-Columbian legends. Although this isone of Ginastera’s first twelve-tone works, itsserial procedures are balanced by folkloric el-ements, including a number of indigenous in-struments among its large percussion forces.

The five vocal movements (1–3; 5–6) dealwith nature, love, war, desolation, andprophecy, while the purely instrumentalfourth movement is a skittery palindromic in-terlude, building from a hushed beginning to-ward a clustered twelve-note sonority beforesinking back into silence.

© Christopher Hailey

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ORCHESTRA ROSTER

Steven Schick, ICE Artist-in-ResidenceKyle Armbrust, violaDavid Bowlin, violin

David Byrd-Marrow, hornKivie Cahn-Lipman, cello

Erik Carlson, violinClaire Chase, flute

Jennifer Curtis, violinNathan Davis, percussion

Peter Evans, trumpetGareth Flowers, trumpetJacob Greenberg, pianoRebekah Heller, bassoon

Nicholas Houfek, lighting designRoss Karre, percussionKatinka Kleijn, cello

Danielle Kuhlmann, hornDaniel Lippel, guitar

Levy Lorenzo, sound and electronicsMichael Lormand, trombone

Campbell MacDonald, clarinetNicholas Masterson, oboe

Michael Nicolas, celloMaiya Papach, viola

Dan Peck, tubaJoshua Rubin, clarinetCory Smythe, pianoAlice Teyssier, flute

Nuiko Wadden, harpRandall Zigler, bass

STAFFClaire Chase, flutist and Artistic Director (CEO)*

Joshua Rubin, clarinetist and Co-Artistic Director*Jonathan Harris, Business Manager

Ross Karre, percussionist andProduction/digitICE.org*

Rebekah Heller, bassoonist and Individual Giving*Ryan Muncy, saxophonist and Grants*

Jacob Greenberg, pianist and Education*Maciej Lewandowski, Production and Operations

AssociateMaro Elliott, Executive Assistant

Jesse Greenberg, Development AssistantAlice Teyssier, Marketing Assistant

* Denotes ICE Artist Partner

ICE’s appearance at the 2015 Ojai Music Festival and Ojaiat Berkeley are made possible by the generous support ofThe Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The MacArthurFund for Arts and Culture at the Prince Charitable Trusts,The New York Community Trust, A. N. and Pearl G.Barnett Family Foundation, The Fan Fox and Leslie R.Samuels Foundation, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music,The Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts, The AmphionFoundation, The Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, TheConcinnity Fund, the BMI Foundation, the Paul R. JudyCenter for Applied Research at the Eastman School ofMusic, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

The OpenICE initiative is made possible throughleadership support of The Andrew W. MellonFoundation, The Booth Ferris Foundation, and NewMusic USA.

INTERNATIONAL CONTEMPORARY ENSEMBLE (ICE)

VIOLINIsaac Allen

Tricia Lee ChenBridget DolkasPierre JoubertKate Hatmaker

Batya MacAdam-SomerIgor PandurskiWes PrecourtHanah StuartPei-Chun TsaiYvonne Shay

VIOLAAngela Choong

Travis MarilMichael Molnau

CELLOElizabeth BrownJudith HamannAbe Liebhaber

BASSJory Herman

Matt Kline

RENGA

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Percussionist, con-ductor, and authorSteven Schick(Music Director)was born in Iowaand raised in afarming family. For40 years, he haschampioned con-temporary musicby commissioningor premièringmore than 150 new

works. He was the founding percussionist ofthe Bang on a Can All-Stars (1992–2002) andserved as Artistic Director of the CentreInternational de Percussion de Genève (2000–2005). Mr.  Schick is founder and ArtisticDirector of the percussion group red fish bluefish. Currently he is Music Director of the LaJolla Symphony and Chorus and, since 2011,Artistic Director of the San FranciscoContemporary Music Players. In 2012, he be-came the first Artist-in-Residence with theInternational Contemporary Ensemble. Mr.Schick founded and is currently ArtisticDirector of “Roots and Rhizomes,” a summercourse on contemporary percussion musicheld at the Banff Centre for the Arts. He main-tains a lively schedule of guest conducting, in-cluding appearances this season with the BBCScottish Symphony Orchestra, the Saint PaulChamber Orchestra, the Nova ChamberEnsemble, and the Asko|Schönberg Ensemble.Among his acclaimed publications is a book,The Percussionist’s Art: Same Bed, DifferentDreams, and numerous recordings of con-temporary percussion music, including athree-CD set of the complete percussionmusic of Xenakis on the Mode label. Modealso released a companion recording on DVDof the early percussion music of KarlheinzStockhausen in September 2014.

Mr. Schick is Distinguished Professor ofMusic at UC San Diego.

The CalArts Sila Ensemble is an outgrowthof the New Century Players: the faculty, stu-dent, and alumni ensemble in residence at

CalArts for over 25 years. In various configu-rations, the group has played at Japan AmericaTheater, Zipper Hall, REDCAT, the KennedyCenter, and at Dartington Center for the Arts,England. Individual members have performednationally and internationally as foundingmembers of ensembles Partch (2015 GrammyAward-winner of Best Classical Compendiumfor Plectra and Percussion Dances), Vir2ualCage, Formalist Quartet, SouthlandEnsemble, Isaura String Quartet, and Liminar.Members also perform regularly withKaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, wild Up,Southwest Chamber Music, The Industry,Knoxville Symphony, Sarasota Opera, TucsonSymphony Orchestra, Blackearth PercussionGroup, XTET, the Lian Ensemble, KimRichmond Jazz Orchestra, and the LosAngeles Philharmonic. Some of the most re-cent performances by members include theU.S. première of Stockhausen’s Kathinka’sGesang, Los Angeles Opera productionsGhosts of Versailles and !Figaro 90210!, worldpremière of Gloria Coates’s opera StolenIdentity, and tour of Pulitzer Award-nomi-nated composition Ten Freedom Summers byWadada Leo Smith. This great variety ofachievements is a direct product of the vari-ety encouraged at the Herb Alpert School ofMusic at CalArts. “A great school,” writesDean David Rosenboom in his welcome let-ter to new students, “is one of ever-open mu-sical possibilities. It is a fertile environment forthe evolution of music-making as well as forthe teaching and learning of music.”

The International Contemporary Ensemble(ICE), described by The New York Times as“one of the most accomplished and adventur-ous groups in new music,” is dedicated to re-shaping the way music is created and

Armen Elliott

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experienced. With a modular makeup of 35leading instrumentalists, performing in forcesranging from solos to large ensembles, ICEfunctions as performer, presenter, and educa-tor, advancing the music of our time by devel-oping innovative new works and strategies foraudience engagement. ICE redefines concertmusic as it brings together new works andnew listeners in the 21st century.

Since its founding in 2001, ICE has pre-mièred over 500 compositions—the majorityof these new works by emerging composers—in venues spanning from alternative spaces toconcert halls around the world. The ensemblehas received the American Music Center’sTrailblazer Award for its contributions to thefield, the ASCAP/Chamber Music AmericaAward for Adventurous Programming, and itwas named Musical America Worldwide’sEnsemble of the Year in 2013. From 2008 to2013, ICE was ensemble-in-residence at theMuseum of Contemporary Art Chicago. ICEmusicians serve as artists-in-residence at theMostly Mozart Festival of Lincoln Center, cu-rating and performing chamber music pro-grams that juxtapose new and old music. In2014, ICE began a partnership with theIllinois Humanities Council, the Hideout inChicago, and the Abrons Art Center in NewYork to support the OpenICE initiative.

ICE has released acclaimed albums on theNonesuch, Kairos, Bridge, Naxos, Tzadik, NewFocus, New Amsterdam, and Mode labels.Recent and upcoming highlights include head-line performances at the Lincoln CenterFestival (New York), Aspekte (Austria), AchtBrücken Musik für Köln (Germany), Festivalde Música de Morelia (Mexico), TeatroAmazonas (Brazil), and performances with theNagoya Philharmonic and Seattle Symphony.ICE has worked closely with conductorsLudovic Morlot, Matthias Pintscher, JohnAdams, and Susanna Mälkki. Since 2012, conductor and percussion soloist Steven Schickhas served as ICE’s Artist-in-Residence.

In 2011, with leading support from TheAndrew W. Mellon Foundation, ICE createdthe ICElab program to place teams of ICE mu-

sicians in close collaboration with six emerg-ing composers each year to develop works thatpush the boundaries of musical exploration.ICElab projects have been featured in morethan one hundred performances from 2011 to2014, and are documented online throughICE’s blog, and DigitICE, an online venue. In2014, ICE launched the OpenICE initiative tobring the full scope of ICE’s programming andeducational activities for free to broader audi-ences around the world.

ICE’s commitment to build a diverse, engagedaudience for the music of our time inspired TheListening Room, an educational initiative forpublic schools without in-house arts curricula.Using team-based composition and graphic no-tation, ICE musicians lead students in the cre-ation of new musical works, nurturingcollaborative creative skills and building an ap-preciation for musical experimentation.

Read more at ICEorg.org.

The New York Times calls red fish blue fish a“dynamic percussion ensemble from theUniversity of California.” Founded 20 years agoby Steven Schick, the ensemble performs,records, and premières works from the last 85years of Western percussion’s rich history.Frequent artists at Ojai at Berkeley, red fish bluefish collaborated with George Crumb, DawnUpshaw, and Peter Sellars to première thestaged version of The Winds of Destiny. Thegroup was also featured in 2012 and 2013 inmusic by John Luther Adams, John Cage, andLou Harrison. Other recent projects include aworld première of Roger Reynolds’s Sanctuaryand the American première of James Dillon’sepic Nine Rivers cycle with the InternationalContemporary Ensemble (ICE). Other recent

Timothy Norris

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collaborations were with eighth blackbird inperformances of works by American icons suchas John Cage and Steve Reich at the ParkAvenue Armory in New York City. The NewYork Times called their “riveting” performanceof John Cage the “highlight” of the program.Recordings of the percussion chamber musicof Iannis Xenakis and Roger Reynolds onMode Records have been praised by criticsaround the world. Red fish blue fish recentlyreleased, to great critical acclaim, the EarlyPercussion Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen onDVD and CD with Mode Records.

Renga is an ensemble of friends and colleaguesfrom UC San Diego, the San Diego Symphony,and beyond. Led by Artistic Directors KateHatmaker and Steven Schick, Renga unites themost recent and provocative contemporarymusic with established classical repertoire insettings ranging from solos and small ensem-bles to full chamber orchestra. The 2014–2015season included several premières and collabo-rations with ICE and Wu Man, as well as performances at the Carlsbad Music Festival,TEDx San Diego, UC San Diego, and the OjaiMusic Festival. Taking its name from a thou-sand-year-old Japanese tradition of “sharedwriting,” Renga seeks to create a progressiveforum of shared artistic vision, community out-reach, and reflection on the impact of art on ourlives. Renga is art for people.

French composer, percus-sionist, and theater directorRoland Auzet defines him-self as a stage writer. Anartist and performer withmany interests and talents,Mr. Auzet received theChevalier des Arts et Lettres

from the French government in 2007 for hisremarkable body of work in contemporarymusic, circus, dance, opera, and theater. Mr. Auzet has collaborated with leading com-posers (Iannis Xenakis, Pierre Boulez, LucFerrari, Heiner Goebbels), circus artists(Jérôme Thomas, Mathurin Bolze), visualartists (Giuseppe Penone), choreographers(Angelin Preljocaj, François Raffinot, MerceCunningham), and playwrights (RainaldGoetz, Eduardo Arroyo, Fabrice Melquiot,Laurent Gaudé).

Mr. Auzet studied music at the ConservatoireNational de Marseilles, Rueil Malmaison, andParis, and was invited by the Institut deRecherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) to participate in the pro-gram Composition and Musical Computing in1997. He was awarded first prize at the interna-tional music competition in Darmstadt and bythe Marcel Bleustein Blanchet Foundation. Mr. Auzet has composed and produced 20 op-eras, plays, and musical works that have beenpremièered in national theaters and operahouses in France and abroad.

Flutist Claire Chase, a 2012MacArthur Fellow, is asoloist, collaborative artist,and activist for new music.Over the past decade she hasgiven the world premières ofover 100 new works forflute, many of them tailor-

made for her. In 2014, she began Density 2036,a project to commission, première, and recordan entirely new program of pieces for fluteevery year until 2036, the 100th anniversaryof the eponymous and seminal piece byEdgard Varèse. Also in the 2014–2015 season, Ms. Chase served as music director and soloist

Guy Vivien

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in a series of performances of SalvatoreSciarrino’s Il Cerchio Tagliato dei Suoni for fourflute soloists and 100 flute “migranti.”

Ms. Chase has performed throughout theAmericas, Europe, and Asia, including débutslast season in Berlin, Frankfurt, Vienna, Paris,London, São Paolo, and Guangzhou. She hasreleased three solo albums: Aliento (2010),Terrestre (2012), and Density (2013). In 2014,she was selected as an inaugural Fellow ofProject&, with which she will première sev-eral new works exploring the relationship be-tween language, music, and social interactionover the next several years.

Ms. Chase was First Prize-winner in the2008 Concert Artists Guild InternationalCompetition. She co-founded the InternationalContemporary Ensemble (ICE) in 2001 andserves as the organization’s Artistic Directorand CEO in addition to playing over 50 con-certs a year as an ensemble member. ICE haspremièred more than 600 works since its in-ception and pioneered a new artist-driven or-ganizational model that earned the company aTrailblazer Award from the American MusicCenter in 2010. Ms. Chase was also honoredwith Crain’s Business “40 under 40” Awardin 2013.

In 2013, Ms. Chase founded The PneaFoundation, a nonprofit organization dedi-cated to the advancement of the flute and itsrepertoire in the 21st century through com-missions, community engagement, cross-cultural and interdisciplinary collaborations,and advocacy.

Pianist Gloria Cheng is ac-claimed as a discerning artistwhose performances tap theemotional core of contem-porary music. In recitals thatexplore significant intercon-nections amongst com-posers, Ms. Cheng has been

presented by the Ojai Music Festival, ChicagoHumanities Festival, William Kapell Festival,and the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary

Music. She has appeared on leading concertseries including Carnegie Hall’s MakingMusic, Cal Performances, Saint Paul ChamberOrchestra’s Engine 408, Stanford Lively Arts,and at (Le) Poisson Rouge.

In recital and on recording, Ms. Cheng cel-ebrates the ineffable kinships that existamongst contemporary composers. About herGrammy Award-winning 2008 disc, PianoMusic of Esa-Pekka Salonen, Steven Stucky,and Witold Lutosławski, The New York Timesnoted: “It’s not just that Ms. Cheng plays thesedaunting pieces with such commanding tech-nique, color and imagination. She has broughttogether works that fascinatingly complementone another.” Such juxtapositions have guidedeach of Ms. Cheng’s recordings, from her 1997Piano Music of John Adams and Terry Riley onTelarc, to her Grammy-nominated 2012 re-lease, The Edge of Light: Messiaen/Saariaho.

In 2015, Ms. Cheng launched MONTAGE,a recording and documentary film featuringworks composed for her by today’s greatestfilm composers. The film includes interviewswith John Williams, Bruce Broughton, DonDavis, Alexandre Desplat, Michael Giacchino,and Randy Newman, along with footage fromthe concert première and composer-ledrecording sessions. The film premièred in various venues following the disc’s Februaryrelease on Harmonia Mundi USA.

In Los Angeles, Ms. Cheng has been a fre-quent guest on the Los Angeles PhilharmonicGreen Umbrella series, performing suchworks as Elliott Carter’s Double Concerto forPiano and Harpsichord conducted by OliverKnussen, John Cage’s Concerto for PreparedPiano, and the world première of Esa-PekkaSalonen’s Dichotomie, composed for and ded-icated to her. She presents an annual recitalon the Piano Spheres series, performing onboth piano and harpsichord, and collaboratesoften with the Calder Quartet and on theJacaranda Music series. Ms. Cheng plays anactive advisory role for Piano Spheres, as wellas for the Hear Now Festival of Los Angeles-based composers.

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Ms. Cheng teaches at the Herb AlpertSchool of Music at UCLA, where she has ini-tiated new courses that unite composers andperformers. She is often invited to speak as anadvocate for contemporary music, and in2012 served as Regents’ Lecturer at UCBerkeley. Ms. Cheng earned her B.A. in eco-nomics from Stanford University, followed bygraduate degrees in music from UCLA andthe University of Southern California.

Hailed by The New YorkTimes as “a versatile, charis-matic soprano endowedwith brilliant technique andsuperlative stage instincts…indispensable to New York’snew-music ecosystem”Mellissa Hughes enjoys a

busy international career in both contempo-rary and early music.

A dedicated interpreter of living composers,Hughes has worked closely with Julia Wolfe,Michael Gordon, David Lang, Steve Reich, andNeil Rolnick, and has premièred works byDavid T. Little, Missy Mazzoli, Ted Hearne,Caleb Burhans, Christopher Cerrone, JacobCooper, and Frederick Rzewski, among others.

In the classical concert hall, she has per-formed Mozart’s Vespers and Requiem underthe baton of Sir Neville Marriner, Handel’sDixit Dominus with Sir David Willcocks, andthe role of Dido under the direction of AndrewLawrence King. Equally at home in front of arock band, Ms. Hughes has received wide-spread acclaim in her role as lead vocalist ofNewspeak, an amplified alt-classical band, andfor her work with Missy Mazzoli’s Victoire.

In the 2013–2014 season, Ms. Hughes con-tinues touring with John Zorn for Zorn@60celebrations, singing his “Madrigals” and“Earthspirit” in Jerusalem, Paris, and at AliceTully Hall in New York (having sung theworks last season in Montreal, Ghent,Warsaw, at the Barbican in London, and at theGuggenheim New York.) She also stars inJonathan Berger’s double-bill opera,Visitations, in a Beth Morrison Production/HERE production for Protoype 2014 at

Roulette, led by Christopher Rountree. Otherhighlights include a recital with pianist LisaMoore for Kettle Corn New Music, a SteveReich program with Alan Pierson and AlarmWill Sound at the Metropolitan Museum ofArt, and a Reich/Bach program with BradLubman and SIGNAL at Miller Theatre.

Last season featured Ms. Hughes perform-ing Silver Threads, a solo cycle written for herby Jacob Cooper on a bill with Corey Dargel at(le) Poisson Rouge; a New York City Operadébut in John Zorn’s The Holy Visions; aStanford Lively Arts performance with AlanPierson and Alarm Will Sound; a nationaltour with Missy Mazzoli and Victoire; and aperformance with Newspeak at Atlas inWashington, D.C.

Other recent dates include the world pre-mière of David T. Little’s Am I Born, a solo or-chestral work written for Ms. Hughes,commissioned by the Brooklyn Philharmonicfor Alan Pierson’s inaugural season as MusicDirector; a rapturously received MATAFestival performance of David Coll’s Position,Influence; the world première of Alex Temple’sLiebeslied with George Manahan and theAmerican Composers Orchestra at ZankelHall for the opening of the SONiC Festival; aperformance of Jonathan Berger’s one-actopera Theotokia with the St. Lawrence StringQuartet and Pedja Mužijević for StanfordLively Arts; a Weill Hall performance andNaxos recording of Mohammed Fairouz’sTahwidahwith the clarinetist David Krakauer;Bryce and Aaron Dessner’s multimedia songcycle The Long Count at the Muziekgebouwin Amsterdam for the Holland Festival; andthe U.S. première of Adrian Utley and WillGregory’s score for The Passion of Joan Arcas part of Lincoln Center’s 2011 White Light Festival.

Ms. Hughes’s discography includes albumson Nonesuch and New Amsterdam records,and Shelter, a video opera by Bang on a Cancomposers Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, andPulitzer Prize-winner David Lang, released byCantaloupe Music. She has also provided sup-porting vocals for My Brightest Diamond, TheNational, and The Breeders.

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Based in Brooklyn, Ms. Hughes holds de-grees from Westminster Choir College andYale University.

Jacob Nissly is the PrincipalPercussionist of the SanFrancisco Symphony underthe direction of MichaelTilson Thomas. Prior to hisappointment in San Francisco,Mr. Nissly was the PrincipalPercussionist of the Cleveland

Orchestra for two seasons and the PrincipalPercussionist of the Detroit SymphonyOrchestra for one season. Previously, he was amember of the New World Symphony inMiami Beach for two seasons. He has per-formed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra,Metropolitan Opera, Houston Symphony, andSaint Paul Chamber Orchestra. He can beheard on recordings with the San FranciscoSymphony, Cleveland Orchestra, and St. LouisSymphony Orchestra. Mr. Nissly is an adjunctProfessor of Percussion at the Eastman Schoolof Music. He also spent two summers playingwith the Verbier Festival Orchestra in Verbier,Switzerland, and two summers with the PacificMusic Festival in Sapporo, Japan. Mr. Nissly hastaught classes at the Juilliard School, Universityof Michigan, Florida State University, Ohio StateUniversity, Indiana University, NorthwesternUniversity, Interlochen Center for the Arts,Cleveland Institute of Music, and the VerbierMusic Camp.

Mr. Nissly holds a bachelor of music andjazz studies degree from NorthwesternUniversity, where he studied with MichaelBurritt, James Ross, Paul Wertico, and JoelSpencer. He received his master of music de-gree from the Juilliard School, where he stud-ied with Greg Zuber and Dan Druckman. Hebegan his percussion studies with WoodySmith in Iowa and has also worked extensivelywith percussionist Michael Werner, PrincipalPercussionist of the Seattle Symphony.

Joseph Pereira enjoys amultifaceted career as a tim-panist/percussionist, com-poser, and teacher. His workin all areas has been widelyhailed for its creativity andvirtuosity.

In 2007, Mr. Pereira was appointed princi-pal timpanist of the Los Angeles Philharmonicby Esa-Pekka Salonen. He regularly appears asa solo percussionist in the orchestra’s GreenUmbrella new music series. Previously, he wasthe assistant principal timpanist/section per-cussionist of the New York Philharmonic, fromJanuary 1998 to September 2008. He currentlyruns the percussion studio at USC’s ThorntonSchool of Music and was on faculty at theJuilliard School from 2005 to 2013.

As a composer, Mr. Pereira’s most recent com-missions have come from Piano Spheres, pianistVicki Ray, percussionist Colin Currie, the MiróQuartet, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, pi-anist Joanne Pearce Martin, and the ManhattanSchool of Music. In 2014, his piece Strophé, com-missioned by Mr. Currie and the Miró Quartet,received its European première in Hamburg,with the Pavel Haas Quartet and Mr. Currie. In2013, his string trio Blur was selected as one ofthe winners of the American Composers Forumof Los Angeles. In 2012, the Los AngelesPhilharmonic premièred his PercussionConcerto with Mr. Currie as soloist. The workwas programmed again the following seasonwith Mr. Pereira as soloist with the Los AngelesPhilharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel and per-formed in Los Angeles and at London’sBarbican. Also in 2012, his quartet for amplifieddouble basses was premièred on the Los AngelesPhilharmonic’s chamber series. Mr. Pereira’sViolin Partita, performed by violinist RobertGupta, was released by Yarlung Records in 2012,and his piece for percussion quartet, Repoussé,was recorded by the Los Angeles PercussionQuartet for Sono Luminus Recordings and re-ceived three 2013 Grammy nominations.

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Described as “phenomenaland fearless,” Grammy-nominated pianist VickiRay is a leading interpreterof contemporary pianomusic. Known for thought-ful and innovative program-ming which seeks to

redefine the piano recital in the 21st century,her concerts often include electronics, video,recitation, and improvisation. As noted byAlan Rich, “Vicki plans programs with aknack for marvelous freeform artistry…whatshe draws from her piano always relates inwondrous ways to the senses.” As a foundingmember of Piano Spheres, an acclaimed seriesdedicated to exploring the less-familiar realmsof the solo piano repertoire, her playing hasbeen hailed by the Los Angeles Times for “dis-playing that kind of musical thoroughness andtechnical panache that puts a composer’sthoughts directly before the listener.”

As a pianist who excels in a wide range ofstyles, Ms. Ray’s numerous recordings covereverything from the première release of SteveReich’s You Are (Variations) to the semi-im-provised structures of Wadada Leo Smith, andfrom the elegant serialism of Mel Powell to theaustere beauty of Morton Feldman’s CrippledSymmetries. Recent releases include DavidRosenboom’s Twilight Language on TzadikRecords and Feldman’s For Piano and StringQuartet with the Eclipse Quartet on BridgeRecords. Her 2013 recording of Cage’s TheTen Thousand Things on the Microfest labelwas nominated for a Grammy.

Ms. Ray’s work as a collaborative artist hasbeen extremely diverse and colorful. She was thekeyboardist in the California E.A.R. Unit andXtet. Her chamber music contributions to the vi-brant musical life in greater Los Angeles includefrequent performances on the Dilijan, Jacaranda,and Green Umbrella Series. She performs regu-larly on the venerable Monday Evening Concertseries and was featured in Grisey’s VortexTemporum on the 2006 celebration of the re-birth of the series.  Ms. Ray has been heard in major solo roles with the Los Angeles

Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Master Chorale,the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players,the German ensemble Compania, and the BlueRider Ensemble of Toronto, with whom shemade the first Canadian recording of PierrotLunaire. Ms. Ray made her last Ojai appearancein 2003 with Music Director Pierre Boulez.

She is head of the piano department at theCalifornia Institute of the Arts, where she hasbeen on faculty since 1991. In 2010, she wasawarded the first Hal Blaine Chair in MusicPerformance. For the past eight years, she has served on the faculty at the Bang on a Can summer festival at the MassachusettsMuseum of Contemporary Art. Ms. Ray is aSteinway Artist.

Joshua Rubin is a found-ing clarinetist and the Co-Artistic Director of theInternational ContemporaryEnsemble (ICE), where heoversees the creative direc-tion of more than 60 con-certs per season in the

United States and abroad. As a clarinetist, TheNew York Times has praised him as “incapableof playing an inexpressive note.”

Mr. Rubin has worked closely with many ofthe prominent composers of our time, includ-ing George Crumb, David Lang, John Adams,George Lewis, Philippe Hurel, Kaija Saariaho,John Zorn, Magnus Lindberg, Steve Lehman,Nathan Davis, Tyshawn Sorey, and MarioDavidovsky. His interest in electronic musicthroughout his career has led him to work onmaking these technologies easier to use forboth composers and performers. Mr.  Rubincan be heard on recordings from the Nonesuch,Kairos, New Focus, Mode, Cedille, Naxos,Bridge, New Amsterdam, and Tzadik labels.His album There Never is No Light, available onICE’s Tundra label, highlights music that usestechnology to capture the human engagementof the performer and the listener.

In the past season he has been featured as asoloist with the Seattle Symphony (underLudovic Morlot) and at the Mostly Mozart

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Festival at Lincoln Center; in engagementswith the Nagoya Philharmonic Orchestra andthe Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra; and hasgiven solo performances of new music in NewYork, Chicago, Los Angeles, São Paulo, Rome,and Berlin.

He received degrees in biology and clarinetfrom Oberlin College and Conservatory, andhis master’s degree from the Mannes Collegeof Music. His clarinet studies were mentoredby Lawrence McDonald, Mark Nuccio, andYehuda Gilad.

Born into a family of theaterand fascinated by connec-tions between scene, text andmusic, Wilifried Wendling(live video and electronicmusic producer) has alreadyrealized about 15 multidisci-plinary shows, presented in

many theaters and operas, on texts of Beckett,Camus, Nietzsche, Perec, Queneau, Jouet,Müller, and Boltanski. His musical composi-tions are also played on numerous stages andfestivals. As a musician and/or video director,he collaborated with numerous artists of manydisciplines. Mr. Wendling is at present directorof the La Muse en Circuit, National Center ofMusical Creation.

Recognized as the world’spremier pipa virtuoso andleading ambassador ofChinese music, Grammy-nominated musician WuMan has carved out a careeras a soloist, educator, andcomposer giving her lute-

like instrument—which has a history of over2,000 years in China—a new role in both tra-ditional and contemporary music. Throughnumerous concert tours, Wu Man has pre-mièred hundreds of new works for the pipa,while spearheading multimedia projects toboth preserve and create awareness of China’sancient musical traditions. Her adventurous

spirit and virtuosity have led to collaborationsacross artistic disciplines allowing her to reachwider audiences as she works to breakthrough cultural and musical borders. Her efforts were recognized when she was namedMusical America’s 2013 instrumentalist of the year, the first time this prestigious awardhas been bestowed on a player of a non-Western instrument.

Orchestral highlights of the 2014–2015 season include a performance of Lou Harrison’sPipa Concerto with the Knights, as wellas ZhaoJiping’s Pipa Concerto No. 2 with the CantonSymphony Orchestra, Charlotte SymphonyOrchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique duLuxembourg, and Orlando PhilharmonicOrchestra. In recital, Wu Man took a new pro-gram, “Journey of Chinese Pipa,” to London,Sydney, and Dortmund. This solo recital ex-plores the history of pipa repertoire, rangingfrom traditional folksongs to her own origi-nal compositions. A collaborator with KronosQuartet for over 20 years, she rejoined the en-semble at Cal Performances to perform TerryRiley’s The Cusp of Magic, which was composed on the occasion of the composer’s70th birthday. A principal member of the SilkRoad Ensemble, she performed with theeclectic group in a concert with the New York Philharmonic.

Born in Hangzhou, China, Wu Man stud-ied with Lin Shicheng, Kuang Yuzhong, ChenZemin, and Liu Dehai at the CentralConservatory of Music in Beijing, where shebecame the first recipient of a master’s degreein pipa. Accepted into the conservatory at age 13, her audition was covered by nationalnewspapers and she was hailed as a childprodigy, becoming a nationally recognized rolemodel for young pipa players. In 1985, shemade her first visit to the United States as amember of the China Youth Arts Troupe. WuMan moved to the United States in 1990 andresides with her husband and son in California.

Wu Man is managed exclusively by Opus 3Artists (www.opus3artists.com).

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BEYOND THE SCORE®

Gerard McBurney (Directorand Creative Director) is aBritish composer and writerabout music. Since 2006, hehas been artistic program-ming advisor at the ChicagoSymphony Orchestra andcreative director of theirBeyond the Score® series. In

this capacity, he had the good fortune to workclosely with Pierre Boulez on a number ofmemorable occasions.

For more on Beyond the Score, please visit http://csosoundsandstories.org/category/beyond-the-score.

Actress Anna Bowen isthrilled to be performing atthe 69th Ojai Music Festival.Her credits include theBroadway production of 101Dalmatians, as well as sev-eral off-Broadway produc-tions, including The Musicof Motown, Rom and Julz,

Doubletime, and Wanda’s World. On the WestCoast, she has appeared in Les Misérables,RENT, Aladdin, Aida, and Evita, among oth-ers, as well as with the Transcendence TheatreCompany. She is also active on television, withcredits including appearances on Castle,Mixology, Law and Order SVU, and As theWorld Turns. She can be seen around LosAngeles singing with the Overstreets NewOrleans Jazz Band, the Melodies, and eclecticsinger Lawrence Rothman. Her nonfictionbook of interviews, Me+You, is available now,and her forthcoming work, Being Biracial, willbe published next spring.

Charlotte Cannon, originallyfrom Brighton, England, is arecent alumna of the ChicagoCollege of Performing Arts.Since graduating last May,she has had the opportunityto collaborate on new workswith the Chicago SymphonyOrchestra, Lookingglass

Theatre Company, Chicago Children’s Choir,Red Tape Theatre, the Inappropriate TheatreCompany, and Fearless Theatre. She is repre-sented by Stewart Talent.

Hailing from San Francisco,Josephine Chan (ageeleven) started piano les-sons at age six. She is cur-rently a scholarship studentin the Pre-College Divisionat the San FranciscoConservatory of Music,where she studies piano per-

formance with Corey McVicar. She wasawarded top prize at the 2012 San FranciscoChopin Competition, and has enjoyed successat several competitions, including the 2015Marilyn Mindell Piano Competition, the 2011and 2013 Junior Bach Festivals, and the 2013American Protégé International PianoCompetition. Performance highlights includeCarnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, the SanFrancisco Conservatory Fanfare Luncheon, SanFrancisco Conservatory Showcase Concert, andLang Lang’s 101 Pianists Workshop.

Margaret Cook is an actressliving in Chicago, where sheearned her B.F.A. in actingat Roosevelt University’sChicago College ofPerforming Arts. She wouldlike to thank her friends andfamily for their support.

Page 36: Ojai at Berkeleycpinfo.berkeley.edu/learn/program_notes/2014/pn_ojai.pdf · Claire Chase, Artistic Director Joshua Rubin, Co-Artistic Director red fish blue fish Renga Gloria Cheng,

PLAYBILL

FESTIVAL PARTICIPANTS

A professional actor sincethe age of seven, ColinCreveling discovered en-semble-based circus whilepursuing his passion fortheater at the ChicagoCollege for PerformingArts. Inspired by the in-struction of Keland Scher,

David Kersnar, and Douglas Grew, he beganworking with Lookingglass Theatre Companyin collaboration with the Chicago SymphonyOrchestra. This union of theater and circuswas the catalyst for the creation of theInappropriate Theatre Company, an ensembleof physical actors and circus performers whodevelop large-scale spectacle performancesand character-driven circus acts for shows andevents within the city. Having spent the lastthree years on and off the road, from 150shows at the largest beach resort in India tothe country’s foremost traveling youth circus,Smirkus, Mr. Creveling is elated to be work-ing with his CCPA family.

Joseph Galizia is an actor,circus performer, perform-ance artist, and rapper residing in Chicago. Sincehis graduation in 2011, hehas had the pleasure ofworking with numeroustheatrical venues, includingLookingglass Theatre Company,

Next Theatre Company, Black EnsembleTheater Company, Actor’s Gymnasium,Chicago Children’s Choir, Fox Valley Repertory,and several shows with the Chicago Symphony

Orchestra. He is delighted to be a part of sucha marvelous production with his friends, andthrilled to be sharing Pierre Boulez’s storywith the world.

Derek Herman is a native ofPortland who has sincemoved to the windy city ofChicago. While in Portland,Mr. Herman was in the West Coast premièreof  Speech & Debate withArtists Repertory Theatre.His other appearances in the

Pacific Northwest include the Profile Theatreand Oregon Children’s Theatre. Since movingto Chicago, he has performed with the ChicagoShakespeare Theater in Since I Suppose, as wellas with the Artistic Home, Teatro Vista, andRaven Theater. Mr. Harman is founder andartistic director of Fearless Theatre. He holds aB.F.A. from the Chicago College of PerformingArts at Roosevelt University.

Growing up in the south-western mountains ofColorado, Nyle Kenninghas had the opportunity to experience nature in itsinfinite forms. He has beenfortunate to have had per-ceptive, challenging, andloving teachers all his life.

Mr. Kenning lives in Chicago as an actor andtheater artist where he pursues a greater un-derstanding of Shakespeare, music, and thecircus arts. He feels blessed to be a part of thisgreat piece again.