Robert Blocker, Dean

march 29, 2012Morse Recital HallThursday at 8 pm

artistic directorChristopher Theofanidis

featured composerSteve Reich

and music ofFeigenbaumGardinerGilbertsonKuspaTierneyWohl

PROGRAM

Vermont Counterpoint (1982)

Ransom Wilson, conductorAnouvong Liensavanh, live fluteConor Nelson, tape fluteKelli Kathman, Ryan Rice, Peng Zhou, flutesGinevra Petrucci, solo piccoloMindy Heinsohn, Kyeong Hoon Seung, James Devoll, piccolosAmanda Baker, Francois Minaux, Sara Andon, alto flutes

Proverb (1995)

Marguerite Brooks, conductorJessica Petrus, Megan Chartrand, Virginia Warnken, sopranosRobert Strabendt, Scott Mello, tenorsNoah Horn, Sara Marks, keyboardsAdam Rosenblatt, Leonardo Gorosito, vibraphones

Gatekeeper

Colin Brookes, viola

Nitwit, Oddment, Blubber, Tweak

Piotr Filochowski, violin Joonhwan Kim, celloPeng Zhou, flute Ashley Smith, clarinetPaul Kerekes, piano

intermission

Steve Reich

Stephen Feigenbaum

Jordan Kuspa

PROGRAM

hedgehog

Gregory Robbins, conductorLaura Keller, violin Timothy LaCrosse, violaAndrew Hayhurst, celloMatthew Rosenthal, double bassKyeong Hoon Seung, flute Igal Levin, bass clarinet Victor Caccese, percussionDan Schlosberg, pianoTrevor Babb, electric guitar

Blue Tigers

Benjamin Firer, conductorEmile Greer, clarinetSoo Jin Huh, basset hornGleb Kanasevich, bass clarinetYun-Chu Chiu, percussionJonathan Allen, percussionSuzana Bartal, piano

Nocturne

Anouvong Liensavanh, fluteGraham Banfield, guitar

Slow Wave

Jonathan Allen, percussionVictor Caccese, percussionCristobal Gajardo-Benitez, percussionLeonardo Gorosito, percussion

William Gardiner

Justin Tierney

Michael Gilbertson

Daniel Wohl

As a courtesy to the performers and audience, turn off cell phones and pagers. Please do not leave the hall during selections. Photography or recording of any kind is prohibited.

PROFILES + NOTES

STEVE REICHcomposer

Steve Reich has been called “America’s greatest living composer” (Village Voice), “...the most original musical thinker of our time” (New Yorker), and “...among the great composers of the [twentieth] century” (New York Times).

His music has been influential to composers and mainstream musicians all over the world. He is a leading pioneer of Minimalism, having in his youth broken away from the “establish-ment” that was serialism. His music is known for steady pulse, repetition, and a fascination with canons; it combines rigorous structures with propulsive rhythms and seductive instru-mental color. It also embraces harmonies of non-Western and American vernacular music (especially jazz). His studies have included the Gamelan, African drumming (at the University of Ghana), and traditional forms of chanting the Hebrew scriptures.

Different Trains and Music for 18 Musicians have each earned him Grammy awards, and his “documentary video opera” works—The Cave and Three Tales, done in collaboration with video artist Beryl Korot—have pushed the boundaries of the operatic medium. Over the years his music has significantly grown both in expanded harmonies and instrumen-tation, resulting in a Pulitzer Prize for his 2007 composition Double Sextet.

Reich’s music has been performed by major orchestras and ensembles around the world,

including the New York and Los Angeles phil-harmonics; London, San Francisco, Boston, and BBC symphony orchestras; London Sinfonietta; Kronos Quartet; Ensemble Modern; Ensemble Intercontemporain; Bang on a Can All-Stars; and eighth blackbird. Several noted choreographers have created dances to his music, such as Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Jirí Kylían, Jerome Robbins, Wayne McGregor, and Christopher Wheeldon.

“There’s just a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history, and Steve Reich is one of them.” — The Guardian (London)

Steve Reich is published by Boosey & Hawkes.

Biography reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes.

Vermont Counterpoint (1982)notes

Vermont Counterpoint (1982) was commissioned by flutist Ransom Wilson and is dedicated to Betty Freeman. It is scored for three alto flutes, three flutes, three piccolos, and one solo part all pre-recorded on tape, plus a live solo part. The live soloist plays alto flute, flute, and picc-olo and participates in the ongoing counterpoint as well as more extended melodies. The piece can be performed by eleven flutists but is intend primarily as a solo with tape.

The duration is approximately ten minutes. In that comparatively short time four sections in four different keys, with the third in a slow-er tempo, are presented. The compositional techniques used are primarily building up canons between short repeating melodic patt-erns by substituting notes for rests, and then playing melodies that result from their combi-nation. These resulting melodies or melodic patterns then become the basis for the follow-ing section as the other surrounding parts in the contrapuntal web fade out. Though the techniques used include several that I discovered as early as 1967, the relatively fast rate of change (there are rarely more than three repeats of any bar), metric modulation into and out of a slower tempo, and relatively rapid changes of key may well create a more concentrated and concise impression.

Proverb (1995)notes

The idea for Proverb was originally suggested to me by the singer and conductor Paul Hiller, who thought of a primarily vocal piece with six voices and two percussion. What resulted was a piece for three sopranos, two tenors, two vibraphones, and two electric organs, with a short text from Ludwig Wittgenstein. Since Paul Hiller is well known as a conductor and singer of early music and since I share an interest in this period of Western music, I looked once again at the works of Perotin (Scholl of Notre Dame, twelfth century) for guidance and inspiration.

The three sopranos sing the original melody of the text in canons that gradually augment or get longer. The two tenors sing duets in shorter rhythmic values against held tones from the sopranos. The two electric organs double the singers throughout (except at the very beginning when they sing a capella) and fill in the harmonics. The piece is in constantly changing meter groupings of twos and threes, giving a rhythmically free quality to the voices. After about three minutes of voices and organ only, the vibraphones enter, enunciating these interlocking shifting groups of two and three beats.

The original theme in the voices is then inver-ted and moves from B minor to E-flat minor. In this contrasting section, the original descend-ing melodic line becomes a rising one. The last part of the piece is one large augmentation canon for the sopranos, returning to the

original key of B minor with the tenors sing-ing their melismatic duets continuously as the canon slowly unfolds around them. This is concluded by a short coda which ends, as the piece began, with a single soprano.

Though the sopranos sing syllabically with one note for each word (and every word of the text is monosyllabic), the tenors sing long melismas on a single syllable. Perotin’s influ-ence may be heard most clearly in these tenor duets against soprano, which clearly resemble three-part organum. That same influence plays a more indirect role in the soprano augment-ation canons, which are suggested by the augmentation of held tenor notes in Perotin’s organum.

The short text – “How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!” – comes from a collection of Wittgenstein’s writing entitled Culture and Value. Much of Wittgenstein’s work is ‘proverbial’ in tone and in its brevity. This particular text was written in 1946. In the same paragraph from which it was taken Wittgenstein continues, “If you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far.”

PROFILES + NOTES

STEPHEN FEIGENBAUMcomposer

Stephen Feigenbaum is a 22-year-old composer from Winchester, Massachusetts. His work draws on aspects of popular music, from the grittiest to the most lyrical.

In 2010, Stephen was the ASCAP Foundation Young Composer Fellow at the Bowdoin International Music Festival. He was also the 2010 winner of the Sacra/Profana (San Diego) choral composition contest. He is a past winner of an ASCAP-Morton Gould Young Composer Award and of competitions sponsored by the New York Art Ensemble, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Palo Alto Chamber Orchestra, and Albany Symphony Orchestra. He received a fellowship for study at the Norfolk (Connecticut) Chamber Music Festival.

His compositions have been performed at Jordan Hall and the Hatch Shell in Boston, the Green Room in San Francisco, Lincoln Center and Le Poisson Rouge in New York, and in cities from Vancouver to Berlin to Prague. One of his works was performed by the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, directed by Erich Kunzel, on a CD released by Telarc in 2009.

Stephen is a music major at Yale, where he conceived Sic Futuristic, a high-energy, multimedia show for new chamber music, including his own compositions. Stephen’s composition work at Yale has been featured on the Yale College website. He has studied with Kathryn Alexander, Martin Bresnick, Michael Gandolfi, Martin Amlin, Rodney Lister, Samuel Adler, and Claude Baker. He

will continue his studies at the Yale School of Music beginning in the fall.

Trionotes

Neither rhyme nor reason; simply, “no”.

WILLIAM GARDINERcomposer

William Gardiner is an Australian composer currently studying at the Yale School of Music with David Lang.

Born in 1987, William Gardiner previously attended the University of Sydney, where he received degrees in Arts and Law. In Australia Gardiner took courses in composition with several of the nation’s leading composers, inclu-ding Matthew Hindson, Paul Stanhope, Anne Boyd, Michael Smetanin and Damien Ricketson.

William Gardiner is the product of a diverse musical pedigree. He was born to a pair of passionate early music enthusiasts, and spent his earliest years immersed in early music, most notably that of Bach, as performed by the likes of Ton Koopman, the Kuijken brothers, and the Savall family. His teenage years were accom-panied by the revelation of rock music, leading to Gardiner taking up the drum set and contrib-uting to his strong rhythmic sense. During his later school years, his interest in composing was provoked by hearing in concert the music of composers such as Astor Piazzolla, Pēteris Vasks, George Crumb, and Alfred Schnittke. Upon finishing high school, Gardiner’s first compositional efforts, works written in imita-tion of Bach and Piazzolla, received perfect scores in the matriculation exams, resulting in performances at the Sydney Opera House. More recently, Gardiner’s work has taken on the influence of inventive contemporary rock groups such as Animal Collective and Canada’s Do Make Say Think, the seething, virtuosic compositions of Italy’s Fausto Romitelli, and the meticulous electronic soundscapes of countryman Ben Frost.

PROFILES + NOTES

hedgehognotes

hedgehog is a piece with several contrasting, seemingly incompatible sections, but there are common threads which run through them all. I tried to give the illusion that they all spring from the same essence. This aspect of the way the piece is constructed reminded me of the philosophy of Ronald Dworkin—who famously defends the ‘hedgehog’ view of moral philosophy—and this is part of the reason for the piece’s title. Not that I am attempting to engage with that philosophy by writing a piece of music! I thought some people might be curious about the title so I felt I should provide a little explanation.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the performers for their dedication and musicianship.

MICHAEL GILBERTSONcomposer

Michael Gilbertson, a native of Dubuque, Iowa, studied composition with Samuel Adler, John Corigliano, and Christopher Rouse at the Juilliard School. Gilbertson’s works have been programmed by ensembles including the Juilliard Orchestra, San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, Grand Rapids Symphony, Sym-phony in C, Cedar Rapids Symphony, Dubuque Symphony, Plymouth Symphony, Flint Sym-phony, Rockford Symphony, Waterloo-Cedar Falls Symphony, Denver Young Artists Orch-estra, Musica Sacra, and Aspen Contemporary Ensemble. His recent commissions include a guitar concerto for the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, a major choral work for Musica Sacra, a ballet for the New York Choreographic Institute, and a work for the OSU Wind Symphony that will be released on the Naxos label in 2012. Gilbertson’s music has earned Morton Gould Awards from ASCAP in 2006, 2007, and 2009, a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Israel Prize from the Society for New Music. His music can be heard in the 2006 documen-tary Rehearsing a Dream, which was nominated for an Academy Award.

In 2009, Michael founded Juilliard in June, an annual music festival which brings six Juilliard musicians to Dubuque, Iowa for concerts and educational outreach. His published music includes choral works with Boosey & Hawkes and G. Schirmer, as well as orchestral works with Theodore Presser. He is currently a master’s degree student at the Yale School of Music, where he studies with Ezra Laderman and Christopher Theofanidis.

Nocturnenotes

This short Nocturne was composed for Red Cedar Chamber Music, a chamber group in Iowa of which I am composer-in-residence. It was specifically written for their rural out-reach concert series, which takes classical and folk music to isolated communities. One such community is the town of Spillville, Iowa, where Antonin Dvorak spent the summer of 1893. As I wrote this piece, I thought of Dvorak in Iowa, dreaming of home.

JORDAN KUSPAcomposer

Jordan Kuspa’s music has been praised in the New York Times as “consistently alive and ins-pired.” His compositions have been performed by the Pittsburgh Symphony, 21st Century Consort, Xanthos Ensemble, Ensemble SurPlus, Third Wheel Trio, Linden String Quartet, organist Chelsea Chen, violist Brett Deubner, Yale Camerata, and the Yale Philharmonia, among others. He has been a composition fellow at June in Buffalo, MusicX, and the Chamber Music Institute at UNL with the Chiara String Quartet. Jordan was the winner of the 2011 Pittsburgh Symphony Audience of the Future Competition, the 2010 League of Composers–ISCM Competition, and the 2007 Robert Avalon Young Composers Com-petition. His work Iterations was selected for the 2011 American Composers Orchestra Underwood New Music Readings. A second degree black belt in traditional karate, Jordan was homeschooled before entering Rice Uni-versity’s Shepherd School of Music. Jordan also holds the M.M. degree from the Yale School of Music, where he is currently studying with Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis, Ezra Laderman, Ingram Marshall, and Christopher Theofanidis.

Nitwit, Oddment, Blubber, Tweaknotes

When I begin a new piece, I often search for an extramusical stimulus to jumpstart my musical thinking. In the case of Nitwit, Oddment, Blubber, Tweak, my inspiration was a literary

one. The four words of the title comprise the entirety of a speech made by a rather important character in a particularly popular book. I loved the idea of juxtaposing four seemingly unre-lated ideas and constructing a dubious unity out of them, so I responded by comp0sing four miniatures that run without interruption. For the character of each section, I again used the title to spur my musical thoughts, but only in the most oblique ways. “Nitwit” is not about anyone in particular, nor is “Oddment” made of fragments of other material.

Nitwit, Oddment, Blubber, Tweak was composed for the inaugural New Music on the Point festival held on the shore of Lake Dunmore in Vermont, and directed by Yale’s own Kathryn Alexander. The two weeks spent there in the summer of 2011 were idyllic and inspirational, and I’m immensely grateful to have been asked to take part.

PROFILES + NOTES

JUSTIN TIERNEYcomposer

Justin Tierney (b. 1984, New Haven, CT, the son of an electrician and brother of a plumber) is finishing an Artist Diploma in music compo-sition at Yale University, where he has studied with Aaron Kernis, Martin Bresnick, Christopher Theofanidis, and Ezra Laderman. His music was declared “superb, robust, and grand” by the Boston Globe. Regarding his aesthetic, Tierney states that “natural phenomena can be admired from either a scientific or aesthetic view, yet the coupling of the two modalities creates an experience greater than their sum.” An aspect of this philosophy is apparent in Tierney’s affective musical surfaces supported by rigorous formal structures.

Before dedicating himself to music, Tierney raced BMX (bicycles) competitively, becoming Connecticut State Champion in 1997. In high school, on a whim, he wandered into an orches- tral concert for the first time and felt “a dam break inside of me.” A performance of Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps pushed him over the edge to give up his career in BMX and aban- don his philosophy major to devote himself to music. Mr. Tierney has studied composition with Jeffrey Johnson and Douglas Townsend at the University of Bridgeport (B.M., 2007), John McDonald at Tufts University (M.A., 2010), and privately with Ryan Vigil. He also studied violin, programed robots to play violin with Kurt Coble, and studied cello with In-Hwa Lee. Tierney is currently an adjunct professor of music at the University of Bridgeport and a teaching fellow at Yale College in music composition.

Blue Tigersnotes

Blue Tigers is inspired by the short story of Jorge Luis Borges of the same name. In the story, Alexander Craigie, professor of logic, investigates reports of blue-colored tigers in a remote Indian village, but instead, to the villagers’ dismay, discovers mysterious blue stones. The stones pop into and out of exis- tence, multiply and disappear, without any apparent logic. Craigie becomes obsessed with the “obscene miracle” of the stones that vio- late the laws of physics and begin to haunt his dreams. He wishes he was mad, since that would be “less disturbing than the discovery that the universe can tolerate disorder. If three plus one can be two, or fourteen, then reason is madness.” He thinks of “those Greek stones that were the first ciphers… Mathematics had its origin and now has its end in stones.”

Blue Tigers is dedicated to my friend and for- mer teacher Ryan Vigil.

DANIEL WOHLcomposer

French-American composer Daniel Wohl draws on his background in electronic music to cre- ate works that intimately merge electronic and acoustic elements.

Recently reviewed by The New York Times as a composer whose music runs “deeper than the cleverness at its surface,” his pieces have been commissioned and/or performed by leading ensembles such as Eighth Blackbird, the Calder Quartet, the American Symphony Orchestra, and the St. Luke’s Chamber En- semble, in venues such as Carnegie Hall, Mass MoCA, the Dia Beacon, and over media out- lets including France 2, PBS, and NPR.

Current events and projects include perfor- mances of “Aorta” for piano and electronics, a piece hailed as “mesmerizing” by the NJ Star-Ledger, at the Gaudeamus Interpreters Competition (Amsterdam) and at Merkin Hall’s Ecstatic Music Festival; commissions from the Albany Symphony, So Percussion, TwoSense, and pianist Kathleen Supove, as well as an album dedicated to his electro-acoustic music on New Amsterdam Records. Daniel Wohl is a three-time ASCAP Young Composer Award winner, and has received grants from the Jerome Foundation, Meet the Composer, and the Brooklyn Arts Council, among others.

Slow Wavenotes

The electronics in Slow Wave involve processed and detuned crotales, as well as distorted drum machine sounds. I would like to thank the Yale percussion studio for their work and creativity in helping me choose particular percussion timbres. Slow Wave was commis- sioned by So Percussion in 2011.

MARGUERITE BROOKSconductor

Professor Brooks was named to the faculty in 1985 to chair Yale’s graduate program in choral conducting and to direct the choral activities at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. She con-ducts the Yale Camerata and serves as director of music at the Church of the Redeemer (UCC) in New Haven. She has taught at Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and Amherst College, and was director of choral music at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. B.A., Mount Holyoke College; M.M., Temple University.

RANSOM WILSONconductor

Ransom Wilson was educated at the North Carolina School of the Arts and the Juilliard School, and continued his postgraduate studies as an Atlantique Scholar in France with Jean- Pierre Rampal. As flute soloist he has appeared with the Israel Philharmonic, English Chamber Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, I Solisti Veneti, Prague Chamber Orchestra, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and the chamber orchestras of Nice, Stuttgart, Cologne, and the Netherlands. He is an artist member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

As a conductor, Mr. Wilson is the music direc- tor and principal conductor of Solisti New York, which he founded in 1981. He is music director of Opera Omaha and the San Francisco Chamber Symphony, as well as artistic director of the OK Mozart Festival in Oklahoma. He was honored by the Austrian government with the Award of Merit in Gold in recognition of his efforts on behalf of Mozart’s music in America, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Alabama.

A strong supporter of contemporary music, Mr. Wilson has had works composed for him by Steve Reich, Aaron Jay Kernis, Ezra Laderman, Randall Woolf, Joseph Schwantner, Peter Schickele, John Harbison, Jean Francaix, Jean- Michel Damase, George Tsontakis, Tania Léon, and Deborah Drattel. In 2007 he was appointed director of the symphony orchestra and teacher of conducting at the North Carolina School of the Arts. He joined the Yale faculty in 1991.

NEW MUSIC NEW HAVEN

artistic directorChristopher Theofanidis

managing directorKrista Johnson

music librarianRoberta Senatore

production assistantKate Gonzales

conducting fellowsPaolo BortolameolliYang Jiao

assistant Benjamin Firer

music librarians Cristobal Gajardo-BenitezTimothy HilgertWai LauQizhen LiuRachel PerfectoHolly PiccoliMatthew RosenthalKathryn SalfelderKaitlin Taylor

stage crew John AllenJonathan AllenJeffery ArredondoColin BrookesTimothy HilgertMichael LevinJonathan McWilliamsShawn MooreMatthew RosenthalAaron SorensenGerald Villella

Thursdays at 8 pmMorse Recital HallFree admission

APR 12Featuring Kaija Saariaho: Serenatas for cello, piano, and percussion, and Terrestre for solo flute with violin, cello, harp, and percussion.

Feigenbaum: Sonata for double bass and pianoKuspa: Picaresque EpisodesSchlosberg: OnceTierney: Escritura del Dios Wang: Monodrama of Old Haven

music.yale.edu

concerts & public relationsDana AstmannDanielle HellerDashon Burton

new mediaMonica Ong ReedAustin Kase

operationsTara DemingChristopher Melillo

piano curatorsBrian DaleyWilliam Harold

recording studioEugene Kimball

Yale School of Music203 432-4158concerts@yale.edumusic.yale.edu/media

COMING UP

Beethoven Symphonies

march 30

Morse Recital Hall | Fri | 5 pm The School of Music’s conducting fellows, Paolo Bortolameolli and Yang Jiao, lead the Yale Philharmonia in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4 and Symphony No. 7. Free Admission

St. Lawrence String Quartet

april 3

Morse Recital Hall | Tue | 8 pm Mozart: Quartet in D minor, K. 421; Korngold: String Quartet No. 3 in D major, Op. 34; John Adams: String Quartet (2008). Tickets $20–30, Students $10

Lunchtime Chamber Music

april 11

Yale Center for British Art | Wed | 12:30 pmMusic for a variety of chamber ensembles.Free Admission

Yale Cellos

april 11

Morse Recital Hall | Wed | 8 pm Aldo Parisot, director. Music of Albinoni, Schumann, Villa-Lobos, Scott Joplin, Ginastera, Davidoff, and more.Tickets $10–20, Students $5