NEW MUSIC SERIES Keith Fitch, director

Sunday, April 15, 2018

Luciano Berio

(1925-2003)

Texts by

E. E. Cummings

David Rakowski

(b. 1958)

Circles (1960)

Stinging

Riverly Is A Flower

N(o)w

Riverly Is A Flower

Stinging

Merav Eldan, mezzo-soprano

Grace Roepke, harp

Taylor Newman, percussion

Tyler Niemeyer, percussion

(Vocal texts are printed on page 3.)

Intermission

Breakdown (2013)

World Premiere

James Thompson, violin

Michael Jones, viola

Joseph Teeter, cello

Sichen Ma, piano

(continued)

4pm | Mixon Hall

New Music Ensemble

Keith Fitch, director

David Rakowski, guest composer

2

Préludes for Piano

World Premiere

Zanzara (Prélude No. 44, Book V, 2014)

Canary (Prélude No. 68, Book VII, 2017)

Bump (Prélude No. 29, Book III, 2013)

Alce Americano (Prélude No. 46,

Book V, 2014)

Zap (Prélude No. 26, Book III, 2013)

Maria Paola Parrini, piano

Arabesques I Have Known (2016)

Dirty Arabesques

Slow and Restrained

Dirtier Arabesques

Alexandria Hoffman, flute/piccolo

Zachary West, clarinet

James Thompson, violin

Joseph Teeter, cello

Taylor Flowers, piano

Michael Hopkins, vibraphone

Yun Song Tay, conductor

David Rakowski

3

TEXTS

I.

stinging

gold swarms upon the spires

silver

chants the litanies the

great bells are ringing with rose the lewd fat bells

and a tall

wind is dragging

the sea

with

dream

-S

II.

riverly is a flower

gone softly by tomb rosily gods whiten

befall saith rain

anguish

of dream-send is hushed

in

moan-loll where

night gathers morte carved smiles

cloud-gloss is at moon-cease

soon verbal must-flowers close

ghosts on prowl gorge

sly slim gods stare

III.

n(o)w

the how

dis(appeared cleverly)world

iS Slapped:with;liGhtninG

!

at

which(shal)lpounceupcrackw(ill)jumps of THuNdeRB

loSSo!M iN -visiblya mongban(gedfrag-

ment ssky?wha tm)eani ngl(essNessUn rolli)ngl yS troll s(who leO v erd)oma insCol

Lide.!high n , o ;w:

theraIncomIng

o all the roofs roar

drownInsound( &

(we(are like)dead )Whoshout(Ghost)atOne(voiceless)O

ther or im) pos sib(ly as

leep) But l!ook-

s

U

n:starT birDs(IEAp)Openi ng t hing ; s(

-sing )all are aLI(cry alL See)o(ver All)Th(e green

?eartH)N,ew

4

Circles Luciano Berio

Music is never pure: it is attitude: it is theatre. It is indivisible from its

gestures.

The task is to entrust the sense of the musical action to the specific

abilities of the protagonists, to give them the possibility of defining for

themselves the conditions through which eventuality is transformed

into reality, before the eyes of the listener, in the hearing of the

viewer.

In Circles the possibilities are enlarged by the presence of the words,

Nos. 25, 76 and 221 from Collected Poems by E. E. Cummings: “stinging

gold swarms...”, “riverly is a flower...”, “n(o)w the how dis(appeared

cleverly)world…”. Poems 25 and 76 appear twice, in different

moments of the musical development.

Circles is not a series of vocal fragments with instrumental

accompaniment, but rather an elaboration of the three poems in a

unified form where vocal and instrumental action strictly condition

each other. The theatrical aspects of the performance are inherent in

the structure of the work itself which is, above all, a structure of

actions: to be listened to as theatre and to be viewed as music.

Circles, commissioned by the Fromm Foundation, was composed in

1960 and performed in the same year at the Berkshire Music Festival

by Cathy Berberian and members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

− Luciano Berio

[Program note on the first performance Berkshire Music Festival,

Tanglewood, August 1, 1960]

Breakdown David Rakowski

Breakdown was written in 2013 and was commissioned by the Verge

Ensemble—which promptly folded. Thus, I have little memory of this

piece. It seems to start with punctuated rising figures that accumulate

into a breakdown (in the pop music sense) which then dissolves into a

passage with decorated swing eighths. This passage itself turns into a

torrent of sextuplets and another breakdown. A contrasting section

with glissando figures emerges, and was music I heard in a dream (I

have a rule about using music I dream and remember), and guess what?

Another breakdown to end the piece.

− David Rakowski

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

5

Préludes for Piano David Rakowski

The third book of piano préludes was written between March and

August 2013. All the titles are onomatopoeia, and that was Karl

Larson’s idea. Zap (No. 26) is a barn-burner with fast, perpetual-

motion eighths alternating with two-hand tremolos. Tempo marking is

Approaching the Speed of light with quarter = 144-299,792,458. Bump

(No. 29) is the one from the book that I can play. It’s a bunch of slow,

repeated note ostinati with chord bumps in them.

Préludes, Book V was begun in April 2014 and finished in March 2015.

The title theme is that all titles are insects or animals translated into

Italian. No. 44, Zanzara is a fast and mercurial piece that was stolen

from a song cycle that was being written at the time. The word means

mosquito. No. 46, Alce Americano, is an Americana stately bichordal

chorale with big chords. It means American elk, which is the only way

to say moose in Italian. I wrote it at Beff’s suggestion, so that in this

book I could have moose and squirrel préludes.

The seventh book of piano préludes was begun in October 2016 and

finished in January 2017. In this book, every title is the name of a color.

− David Rakowski

Arabesques I Have Known David Rakowski

My friend Geoff Burleson, who always stays with me when he does

piano gigs in Boston, posted a video of himself on YouTube playing a

Suzuki Andes keyboard—a kind of silly-sounding thing reminiscent of

the pan pipe instrument that the Peruvian guys playing on the street in Harvard Square use. I knew I had to write for it, and for Geoff to play

it. That opportunity came when Boston Musica Viva commissioned

YAPPPP (Yet Another Pierrot Plus Percussion Piece)—making it my

seventh piece for the ensemble. Using the Andes Keyboard was a way

of making it challenging fun to write for the ensemble. The first

movement is made up of antsy arabesques that eventually accompany a

long-note melody. The second movement is built from a dialogue of

stopped piano notes doubled in cello pizzicato and falling figures. The

finale starts antsy and eventually settles into a groove-like texture.

Over the groove, the Andes keyboard and piccolo play in unison and

sometimes in tandem. That part sounds like Martian bebop. After an

improvised cadenza, the antsy music returns.

− David Rakowski

6

ABOUT THE COMPOSERS

LUCIANO BERIO’s biography begins like the story of many Italian

(and German, and French…) composers of the past: his ancestors

were all musicians since the 18th century. He was born in a small

town, Oneglia, where his grandfather and his father played the organ in

a local church and composed.

While Ernesto Berio was an ardent admirer of Il Duce, his son was an

equally ardent antifascist—he could not forgive Mussolini for falsifying

music history by suppressing the works of the pioneering composers

of the 20th century. Having grown up in the provinces, Berio was in

any case handicapped by having been cut off from cultural life, but

Italian fascism aggravated his isolation by depriving him access to the

music which would have been so essential for his development.

Berio was convinced of the need for young composers to come to

terms with the achievements of their predecessors by studying their scores and writing music in various styles. He owed a great deal to his

teacher Ghedini, under whose influence he learned to love and respect

the music of Monteverdi (in 1966, he was to make an arrangement of Il

Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda); and to his friend Bruno Maderna

(“I learned for instance from the way he conducted Mozart or my

works and his own. He had a thorough knowledge of early

counterpoint, Dufay and the others, and studied electronic music

much earlier than I did.”).

Berio and Maderna founded together the Studio di Fonologia Musicale

(1955) where Mutazioni, Perspectives and Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) as

well as Différences were composed. They also established a journal,

Incontri musicali (1956-60) a title which they also gave to a concert

series, with Boulez, Scherchen and Maderna among the conductors.

(“We had many enemies. I remember on one occasion, when Boulez

was conducting, it came to a scuffle so that the police had to

intervene.”)

Next to Ghedini and Maderna, Berio also learned a great deal from

Henri Pousseur, whom he had met in Darmstadt in 1954. “If I look

back at those years, I feel gratitude to three people: Ghedini, Maderna

and Pousseur. After all, I was still the young man from Oneglia, and I

needed their help to understand many things about music.”

Over the years and decades, Luciano Berio grew to become a

towering figure in international musical life. Similarly to a handful of

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other composers, all born in the 1920s (including Boulez and Nono),

whatever he produced became a milestone in the history of music—

whether works for solo instruments and solo voice (the Sequenza-

series), pieces for chamber ensemble (including the Chemins, based on

some of the Sequenze), orchestra (Sinfonia—with eight voices added to

the ensemble—is to this day a representative composition of the

1960s), chorus and orchestra (Coro being an emblematic treatment of

folk music within the framework of a contemporary composition),

voice and orchestra (such as Epiphanies), solo voice, chorus and

orchestra (Berio’s farewell to composition: Stanze for baritone, male

chorus and orchestra) and all his music theatre pieces (Passaggio, La

vera storia, Un re in ascolto, Laborintus II…).

He never lost his awareness of and interest in his predecessors—

hence his reconstruction of an unfinished Schubert symphony in

Rendering, his arrangements and instrumentations of Purcell,

Boccherini, de Falla, Verdi, Mahler, Puccini and Weill. Neither did he

close his ears to music outside the sphere of the concert hall and

theatre: he was an admirer of the Beatles and arranged some of their

hits. He also orchestrated a group of folksongs under the eponymous

title Folk Songs, which has in its turn also become a hit.

Luciano Berio was conscious of his responsibilities as a member of

society. He said he could not understand composers who deluded

themselves to be a mouthpiece of the universe or mankind. As he put

it: “In my view it is enough if we endeavor to become responsible

children of society.”

(Biography courtesy of Universal Edition)

~ ~ ~

DAVID RAKOWSKI was born and raised in St. Albans, Vermont,

where he played trombone in high school and community bands, and

keyboard in a mediocre rock band called The Silver Finger. Early

musical challenges included taking pop songs off the radio for his band

to play. He was his high school class’ valedictorian and its Best

Thespian.

He received his musical training at New England Conservatory,

Princeton and Tanglewood, where he studied with Robert Ceely, John

Heiss, Milton Babbitt, Paul Lansky, Peter Westergaard and Luciano

Berio. He spent the four years after graduate school not writing his

dissertation, holding down dismal part-time word-processing jobs and

8

helping to run the Griffin Music Ensemble in Boston. At the end of

those four years, he took a running leap into academia with a one-year

appointment at Stanford University. Seven years later, he finished his

dissertation.

Rakowski’s most widely-performed music is his collection of one

hundred highly varied and high-energy piano études; these pieces

approach the idea of etude from many different angles, be they

technical, conceptual, compositional or stylistic; many of them may be

viewed on YouTube. He is now at work on a set of piano préludes and

has finished seventy-four of a projected one hundred. He has also

written six symphonies, nine concertos, three large wind ensemble

pieces, a sizable collection of chamber and vocal music, as well as

incidental music and music for children.

Rakowski’s awards include the Rome Prize, Arts and Letters Award

from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2006 Barlow Prize

and 2004-6 Elise L. Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of

Lincoln Center, as well as awards and fellowships from the

Guggenheim Foundation, NEA, Rockefeller Foundation, Tanglewood

Music Center, BMI, Columbia University, Orleans International Piano

Competition (Chevillion-Bonnaud composition prize), International

Horn Society and various artist colonies. He is the only composer ever

to be commissioned both by Speculum Musicæ and “The President’s

Own” US Marine Band. He has also been commissioned by the

Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Sequitur, Network for New Music,

Koussevitzky Music Foundation (twice), Boston Chamber Music

Society, Collage New Music, Kaufman Center/Merkin Hall, Boston

Musica Viva, Fromm Foundation (twice), Dinosaur Annex, Network

for New Music, Triple Helix and others. In 1999, his Persistent Memory,

commissioned by Orpheus, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in

Music, and, in 2002, his Ten of a Kind, commissioned by “The

President's Own” US Marine Band, was also a finalist for the Pulitzer

Prize. He has been composer-in-residence at the Bowdoin Summer

Music Festival, guest composer at the Wellesley Composers

Conference, the Karel Husa Distinguished Professor of Music at the

Ithaca College School of Music, the Maurice Abravanel Visiting

Composer at the University of Utah (twice) and a Master Artist at the

Atlantic Center for the Arts; since 2011, he has been composer-in-

residence with the New England Philharmonic Orchestra. His music is

published by C.F. Peters, is recorded on New World/CRI, Innova,

Americus, Albany, Ravello, New Focus, ECM, Blue Griffin, Centaur,

9

Capstone, BMOP/sound and Bridge, and has been performed

worldwide. His second CD of orchestral music, “Stolen Moments,”

was recently released on BMOP/sound, and a fourth volume of piano

études performed by Amy Briggs was released on Bridge Records in

December 2016. He also contributed a solo piano arrangement of

“The Ladies Who Lunch” to the album Liaisons: Re-Imagining Sondheim

from the Piano performed by Anthony de Mare on ECM Recordings. In

2016, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

After his year at Stanford, Rakowski taught at Columbia University for

six years, then joined the faculty of Brandeis University, where he is

now the Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Composition. While at

Brandeis, he has also taken part-time appointments teaching at

Harvard University (twice) and New England Conservatory (also

twice). Now a distinguished ex-trombonist, he lives in Boston exurbia

and in Maine with his wife Beth Wiemann and exactly one cat named

Sunset.

~ ~ ~

ABOUT THE DIRECTOR

KEITH FITCH currently heads the Composition Department and

holds the Vincent K. and Edith H. Smith Chair in Composition at the

Cleveland Institute of Music, where he also directs the CIM New

Music Ensemble. Called “gloriously luminous” by The Philadelphia

Inquirer, his music has been consistently noted for its eloquence,

expressivity, dramatic sense of musical narrative and unique sense of

color and sonority. Reviewing a performance of his work Totem by

Wolfgang Sawallisch and The Philadelphia Orchestra (chosen by

Maestro Sawallisch to celebrate the orchestra’s centennial), The Wall

Street Journal praised “the sheer concentration of his writing, and its

power to express a complex, unseen presence shaping the course of

musical events.” The American Academy of Arts and Letters has said, “[his] music reveals an individual landscape that concentrates on

unusual textures and sounds—all within a strong narrative that drives

towards a rich and powerful conclusion.” His works have been

performed throughout the US, Europe and Asia by such ensembles and

soloists as The Philadelphia Orchestra, American Composers

Orchestra, League of Composers Orchestra, Chamber Music Society

of Lincoln Center, St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble, Colorado Quartet,

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Da Capo Chamber Players, percussionist James Preiss, harpist Yolanda

Kondonassis and guitarist Jason Vieaux, and many others. His music

has been heard at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, June in Buffalo

Festival, Atlantic Center for the Arts and New York’s Carnegie and

Merkin Halls, among others, as well as in university settings

nationwide. Recent works include a Piano Quartet, “Last Words;” The

Range of Light, a setting of texts by John Muir, commissioned by the

Rocky Ridge Music Center to celebrate its seventy-fifth anniversary;

and Three English Sonnets, a solo flute work for Joshua Smith, principal

flute of The Cleveland Orchestra.

A native of Indiana, Keith Fitch (b. 1966) began composing at age 8 and

began formal musical training on the double bass at age 11. While still

in high school (age 16), he received his first professional orchestral

performance. He attended the Indiana University School of Music,

where he studied composition with Frederick Fox, Eugene O’Brien and

Claude Baker; double bass with Bruce Bransby and Murray Grodner;

and chamber music with Rostislav Dubinsky, founder of the Borodin

Quartet. He also counts Donald Erb and Joan Tower among his

compositional mentors. Among his many awards are three each from

ASCAP and the National Society of Arts and Letters, an Individual

Artist Grant from the Indiana Arts Commission and the National

Endowment for the Arts, a Fromm Music Foundation Commission,

two Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, a

Copland House Residency Award and the 2016 Walter Hinrichsen

Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has

enjoyed multiple residencies at The MacDowell Colony and the

Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, as well as at Yaddo, The Charles

Ives Center for American Music and the Atlantic Center for the Arts,

and he has twice served as Resident Composer and faculty at the

Chamber Music Conference and Composers’ Forum of the East.

Highly regarded as a teacher, chamber music coach and conductor of

new music, he has taught at Indiana University, Bard College and for

eleven years served on the faculty of the Mannes College of Music in

New York. He frequently appears as guest composer at colleges and

universities nationwide, and his students regularly win awards from

such prestigious organizations as ASCAP, BMI, the American Academy

of Arts and Letters and the Fulbright Foundation, as well as attending

leading summer festivals around the world. A passionate advocate for

new music, for five years, he curated a concert series at Cleveland’s

Museum of Contemporary Art, and he has mentored such ensembles

as Cleveland’s FiveOne Experimental Orchestra and Ars Futura

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ABOUT THE ENSEMBLE

The CIM New Music Ensemble was first formed as the CIM

Contemporary Music Ensemble in 1973 by composer Donald Erb (a

precursor to the ensemble was CIM’s “Portfolio” Series in the early

1970s). Its first concert was given on October 10, 1973 and was

devoted to the music of Bernard Heiden, with whom Erb had studied

at Indiana University. Since then, the ensemble has been led by Larry

Baker and Margaret Brouwer; it is currently led by Keith Fitch, Head of

the CIM Composition Department. Devoted to the music of our

time—as well as classics of the twentieth century—in recent years the

ensemble has hosted many of today’s leading composers, including

Claude Baker, Chen Yi, Donald Crockett, Stephen Hartke, James

Mobberly, Shulamit Ran, David Rakowski, Augusta Read Thomas,

Steven Stucky and Joan Tower, among others. Members of the

ensemble have gone on to found such new music ensembles and series

as Classical Revolution Cleveland, FiveOne Experimental Orchestra

and Ars Futura, as well as being members of such nationally-recognized

groups as wild Up and the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble. Recent

alumni of the ensemble include the 2014 Gold Medal Laureate of the

International Violin Competition of Indianapolis, Jinjoo Cho. For

several years, the ensemble partnered with the Museum of

Contemporary Art Cleveland as part of their concert series; recent

concerts include a repeat appearance at the Cleveland Museum of Art

and at the Bob Stop as part of the 2018 NEOSonic Festival.

~ ~ ~

ensemble, as well as individual members of leading new music

ensembles throughout the country. In June 2015, he joined the faculty

at the Rocky Ridge Music Center as Composer-in-Residence and

Director of the Young Artist Seminar in Composition. His music is

published by Non Sequitur Music and Edition Peters and appears on

Azica Records and Naxos Digital. He joined the CIM faculty in 2008.

www.keithfitch.com.

~ ~ ~

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April 18, Wednesday

7pm & 7:45pm | Shafran Planetarium

Cleveland Museum of Natural History, 1 Wade Oval Dr., Cleveland

360° of Sight + Sound: The Planetarium Project

Through the Ages

A unique collaboration between the Cleveland Institute of Music,

Cleveland Institute of Art and Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

Join us for the premiere of 360-degree original films by CIA students,

scored by CIM student composers, shown on CMNH’s Planetarium

dome.

Tickets: $13

CMNH: 216.231.1177

April 29, Sunday

4pm | Mixon Hall

Composition Department Recital

New works by CIM student composers

UPCOMING EVENTS