Illinois Wesleyan University School ofMusic PRESENTS
SYMPOSIUM OF
Featured Guest
Kyle
Gann
Composer IMusicologist
February 12-13,2016
Symposium of Contemporary Music February 12, 7:30
PM
School ofMusic 258 Charles Ives: Translating Literature Into Sound Presentation by Kyle Gann T his program is presented as part of the IWU New Music Series. To receive email notifications of future New Music Series events, contact David Vayo, Series director: dvayo@iwu.edu.
February 13, 7:30
PM
Westbrook Auditorium
Music of Kyle Gann World Premiere Performances Implausible Sketches
(2006/2011)
1. The Desert's Too-Zen Song 2. Mediating Daydream 3. The Goodbye Fugue 4. Frigid Azure 5. Don't Touch My Pint Nanc y Pounds, William West, piano
Intermission
Transc endentalist Songs (2014) Enosis (Christopher Pearse Cranch)
1
To the Face Seen in the Moon (Margaret Fuller)
1
I Slept, and Dreamed that Life Was Beauty (Ellen Sturgis Hooper)
(1991)
1
The Rhodora (Ralph Waldo Emerson) The Columbine (Jones Very)
2
2
In the Busy Streets (Henry David Thoreau)
(1983)
3
Indeed, Indeed I Cannot Tell (Henry David Thoreau) 3 The Garden (Christopher Pearse Cranch) 3 Questionings (Frederick Henry Hedge) 1.
2
Ingrid Kammin, soprano; Larisa Chasanov, piano
2. Robert Mangialardi, baritone; David Vayo, piano
3.
William Hudson, tenor; R. Kent Cook, piano
Following the program, the audience is invited to a reception in the Presser Hall reception room, courtesy of Sigma Alpha Iota This program was made possible with the support of the Anna McGrosso Visiting Artists Fund This program is presented as part of the IWU New Music Series. To receive email notifications of future New Music Series events, contact David Vayo, Series director: dvayo@iwu.edu.
Kyle Gann Kyle Gann, born 1955 in Dallas, Texas, is a composer and was new-music critic for the Village Voice from 1986 to 2005. Since 1997 he has taught music theory, history, and composition at Bard College. He is the author of The Music of Conlon Nancarrow (Cambridge University Press, 1995), American Music in the 20th Century (Schirmer Books, 1997), Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice (University of California Press, 2006), No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage's 4'33" (Yale University Press, 2010), Robert Ashley (University of Illinoi� Press, 2012), Essays After a Sonata: Charles Ives's Concord (University of Illinois Press, 2016), and The Arithmetic of Listening: Tuning Theory and History for the Impractical Musician (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming). He also wrote the introductions to the 50th-anniversary edition of John Cage's Silence and to the new edition of Robert Ashley's Perfect Lives. Gann studied composition with Ben Johnston, Morton Feldman, and Peter Gena. Of his hundred-plus works to date, about a fourth are microtonal, using up to 37 pitches per octave. His rhythmic language, based on differing successive and simultaneous tempos, was developed from his study of Hopi, Zuni, and Pueblo Indian musics. His music has been performed on the New Music America, Bang on a Can, and Spoleto festivals. His major works include Sunken City, a piano concerto commissioned by the Orkest de Volharding in Amsterdam; Transcendental Sonnets, a 35-minute work for choir and orchestra commissioned by the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir; Custer and Sitting Bull, a microtonal, one-man music theater work he's performed more than 30 times from Brisbane to Moscow; The Planets, commissioned by the Relache ensemble via Music in Motion and continued under a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artists' Fellowship; and The Hudson River Trilogy, a trio of microtonal chamber operas written with librettist Jeffrey Sichel, the first of which, Cinderella's Bad Magic, was premiered in Moscow and St. Petersburg. In 2007, . choreographer Mark Morris made a large-ensemble dance, Looky, from five of Gann's works for Disklavier (computerized player piano). In addition to Bard, Gann has taught at Columbia University, Brooklyn College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Bucknell University. His writings include more than 2500 articles for more than 45 publications, including scholarly articles on La Monte Young (in Perspectives of New Music), Henry Cowell, John Cage, Edgard Varese, Ben Johnston, Mikel Rouse, John Luther Adams, Dennis Johnson, and other American composers. He writes the "American Composer" column for Chamber Music magazine, and he was awarded the Peabody Award (2003), the Stagebill Award (1999) and the Deems Taylor Award (2003) for his writings. His music is available on the New Albion, New World, Cold Blue, Lovely Music, Mode, Meyer Media, Brilliant Classics, New Tone, and Monroe Street labels. In 2003, the American Music Center awarded Gann its Letter of Distinction, along with Steve Reich, Wayne Shorter, and George Crumb.
Implausible Sketches I love the two-piano medium. Some of my favorite works are written for it: Busoni's Fantasia Contrappuntistica, Satie's Trois Morceau en form de poire,
Ives's quarter-tone pieces, Stockhausen's Mantra, Ligeti's MonumentlSelbst PortraitlBewegung, Zimmermann's Monologe, Bartok's and Jonathan Kramer's two-piano Sonatas with percussion, Kevin Volans's Cicada, Reigger's Variations. My first work for two pianists was an ambitious, difficult, irascible early work: I'itoi Variations (1985). I always wanted to write another, better, less virtuosic one that reflected my more mature aesthetic. In summer of 2006 I had the time, and wrote Implausible Sketches. I decided to make it playable for two pianists at one keyboard, to facilitate performance - and the pieces all have the faculty of playing the low and high registers off of each other. A critic had then recently remarked that my music was "a little too Zen" for his taste, and I wanted to write something Zen indeed. The pieces are truly all sketches, rhythmic ideas, a loose grouping of implausible rhythmic etudes. "The Desert's Too-Zen Song" is based on a 61-beat ostinato, interrupted every 103 beats - the kind of large-scale, prime-numbered cross-rhythm I delight in. (In 2011 I expanded and orchestrated this movement as an orchestra piece, Desert Song.) " The Goodbye Fugue" is the only fugue, loosely speaking, I've ever written; it, too, pauses every 11th measure. " Frigid Azure" struck me as the kind of long, monotonous, despairing ambient piece that the record label Cold Blue speCializes in. The title of "Don't Touch My Pint" is a cleaned-up version of an Irish mnemonic for the rhythm four-against-five (" don't f-ing touch my pint again"), which runs throughout the movement. I had always wanted to write an additional slow movement on the rhythm eight-against-nine, but despite much sketching, the piece eluded me for years. Not until 2011 did I hit upon the happy idea, in "Mediating Daydream," of making the harmonic rhythm incommensurate with the eight and nine tempos, which at last made the piece fall together nicely. I rather thought of the piece as an unorchestrated symphony, and then finally, in 2014, at the suggestion of my friend the composer Robert Carl, I finally orchestrated it, and called the result the Implausible Symphony. (My other non symphony symphony is the choral piece Transcendental Sonnets of 2001-2.)
Transcendentalist Songs Having gotten hooked on Louisa May Alcott in second grade and Nathaniel Hawthorne not much later, I have been an enthusiast for the American Transcendentalists of Concord, Massachusetts, my entire life. The Transcendentalists were a religious/philosophicallliterary movement that, from 1836 to 1860, broke away from the traditional Christian church and created a new atmosphere in American intellectual life. Most people think of the movement today as consisting of the writings of Emerson and Thoreau. For decades I had wanted to write a collection of Transcendentalist poems set to music, and I wrote a couple way back when, but as it was difficult to get singers to make the requisite commitment, I never went further. Some poems, like Cranch's "Enosis," Emerson's "The Rhodora," and Hedge's "Questionings," I thought so much about setting that I have been humming their disembodied vocal lines to myself for decades. At last I decided to tie up this particular loose end, and started writing my Transcendentalist Songs at a rapid pace. My songs may seem like an oddity in my output, for I allow their idiom to be
totally inspired by the rhythm and meaning of the poem itself, with no concern whether they "sound like me" or even in any way contemporary. Although there are many musical correspondences among them, these songs constitute a loose collection, singable in any combination and in any order. This is also an open-ended project, and I may add new songs to it from time to time. I include my previous songs by Thoreau and Ellen Sturgis Hooper as an appendix to the set; not quite in the same style as the more recent songs, but worthy, I think, of being mixed in as the performers may prefer. Enosis, or henosis, is a Greek term meaning mystical union. Christopher Pearse Cranch began his Transcendentalist career as editor of The Western Messenger in Ohio, but returned to Boston and abandoned preaching for a life of deliberate dilettantism in the arts; Perry Miller calls him the only member of the movement who possessed "a feeling for frivolity." His poem "Enosis," published in an early installment of the The Dial under the nondescript title "Stanzas," was an attempt to translate leading Transcendentalist tenets into poetry, the thought that while we are all united in the collective unconscious (to insert Tung's later term), language is incapable of bringing us into true communion. Enosis Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813-1892) Thought is deeper than all speech, Feeling deeper than all thought; Souls to souls can never teach What unto themselves was taught. We are spirits clad in veils; Man by man was never seen; All our deep communing fails To remove the shadowy screen. Heart to heart was never known; Mind with mind did never meet; We are columns left alone, Of a temple once complete. Like the stars that gem the sky, Far apart, though seeming near, In our light we scattered lie; All is thus but starlight here. What is social company But a babbling summer stream? What our wise philosophy But the glancing of a dream? Only when the sun of love Melts the scattered stars of thought; Only when we live above What the dim-eyed world hath taught; Only when our souls are fed By the Fount which gave them birth, And by inspiration led, Which they never drew from earth,
We like parted drops of rain Swelling till they meet and run, Shall be all absorbed again, Melting, flowing into one. Margaret Fuller was the leading American advocate for women's rights in the early 19th century, and, as a brilliant scholar and close friend of Emerson and other Transcendentalists, became editor of their publication The Dial from 1840 to 1844. She included her poem "To the Face Seen in the Moon" in a letter to her lover James Nathan, who already had a child by another woman and was rather jerking her around. Fuller has been so masculinized by history, so deprived of feminine qualities, that I thought she deserved a kind of jazzy torch ballad, a song that would bring her love longings to the fore. I set only the first half of this long poem; the second half uses a contrasting and less musical syllabic scheme. To the Face Seen in the Moon Margaret Fuller (1810-1840) Oft, from the shadows of my earthly sphere, I looked to thee, orb of pale pearly light, To loose the weariness of doubt and fear In thy soft mother-smile so pensive bright, Thou seemedst far and safe and chastely living Graceful and thoughtful, loving, beauty-giving, But, if I steadfast gaze upon thy face A human secret, like my own, I trace, For, through the woman's smile looks the male eye So mildly, steadfastly but mournfully He holds the bush to point us to his cave, Teaching anew the truth so bright, so grave Escape not from the middle of the earth. Through mortal pangs to win immortal birth, Both man and woman, from the natural womb Must slowly win the secrets of the tomb, And then, together rising fragrant, clear, The worthy Angel of a better sphere, Diana's beauty shows how Hecate wrought, Apollo's lustre rays the zodiac thought ( In Leo regal, as in Virgo fair, As Scorpio's secret, as the Archer rare,) In unpolluted beauty mutual shine Earth, Moon and Sun the Human thought Divine, For Earth is purged by tameless central fire, And Moon in man has told her hid desire, And Time has found himself eternal Sire And the Sun sings All on his ray-strung lyre.... Ralph Waldo Emerson is today, or course, more than anyone else the public face of Transcendentalism, the central figure and famous lecturer whose essays
(along with Thoreau's writings) are all most people know of the movement. His 1847 poem "The Rhodora" is quoted by Charles Ives in Essays Before a Sonata, where I first encountered it. The Rhodora Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes, I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods, Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook, To please the desert and the sluggish brook. The purple petals fallen in the pool Made the black water with their beauty gay; Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool, And court the flower that cheapens his array. Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why This charm is wasted on the earth and sky, Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing, Then beauty is its own excuse for Being; Why thou wert there, 0 rival of the rose! I never thought to ask; I never knew; But in my simple ignorance suppose The self-same power that brought me there, brought you. Thoreau's poems vary greatly in quality. "Indeed, Indeed I Cannot Tell" was included in an 1852 essay called " Love" that Thoreau sent to a Mr. Harrison Blake of Worcester, Mass., in execution of a promise. In the essay he muses on the difficulty of love, and notes that "There is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages." Hatred was something Thoreau thought about often, it seems. He confided to his 1851 Journal that " I love my friends very much, but I find that it is of no use to go see them. I hate them commonly when I am near." Indeed, Indeed I Cannot Tell Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) Indeed indeed, I cannot tell, Though I ponder on it well, Which were easier to state, All my love or all my hate. Surely, surely, thou wilt trust me When I say thou dost disgust me. 0, I hate thee with a hate That would fain annihilate; Yet sometimes against my will, My dear friend, I love thee still. It were treason to our love, And a sin to God above, One iota to abate Of a pure impartial hate.
I have written elsewhere at length on Jones Very, the possibly mad poet whose poems I set in my chorus-and-orchestra piece Transcendental Sonnets. Written on June 9, 1838, "The Columbine" is a meditation on achieving identification with a flower, a kind of Zen "lilies of the field" sermon. Since the columbine is a flower that takes the shape of a two flowers of different colors, one inside the other, I fashioned the accompaniment from pairs of mismatched triads that gradually separate as the voice and piano achieve harmonic union. The Columbine Jones Very (18l3-1880) Still, still my eye will gaze long fixed on thee, Till I forget that I am called a man, And at thy side fast-rooted seem to be, And the breeze comes my cheek with thine to fan. Upon this craggy hill our life shall pass, A life of summer days and summer joys, Nodding our honey-bells mid pliant grass In which the bee half hid his time employs; And here we'll drink with thirsty pores the rain, And turn dew-sprinkled to the rising sun, And look when in the flaming west again His orb across the heaven its path has run; Here left in darkness on the rocky steep, My weary eyes shall close like folding flowers in sleep. Cranch's poem "The Garden" expresses the frequent Transcendentalist theme of finding religious inspiration in nature, but also seems to point to Cranch's growing disillusionment with the ministry, which he eventually abandoned. I have set only the first sonnet of two; the second is a grumpier complaint about the limited relevance of the clergy, which would have required a less idyllic mood. The Garden (1852) Naught know we but the heart of summer here. On the tree-shadowed velvet lawn I lie, And dream up through the close leaves to the sky, And weave Arcadian visions in a sphere Of peace. The steaming heat broods all around, But only lends a quiet to the hours. The aromatic life of countless flowers, The singing of a hundred birds, the sound Of rustling leaves, go pulsing through the green Of opening vistas in the garden walks. Dear Summer, on thy balmy breast I lean, And care not how the moralist toils or talks; Repose and Beauty preach a gospel too, Deep as that sterner creed the Apostles knew....
A leading scholar of German literature, Frederick Henry Hedge was so central to the Transcendentalist movement that the Transcendentalist Club, which began meeting in 1836, was originally referred to informally as " Hedge's Club." He was not a poet by inclination, but during a ride in a mail coach from his pastorate in Bangor to Boston, he watched the stars, and upon his arrival wrote the following lines, his only poem (thus I have set his complete poetry to music). He kept his distance from The Dial for fear of antagonizing his Bangor Unitarian parishioners, but he did allow Fuller to publish this poem in the Dial issue of January, 1841. Like Cranch's "Enosis," it is a poetized epistemological essay, an articulate statement of the principle of solipsism and the difficulty of knowing the outer world through our senses. Questionings ( The Idealist) Frederic Henry Hedge (1805-1890) Hath this world, without me wrought, Other substance than my thought? Lives it by my sense alone, Or by essence of its own? Will its life, with mine begun, Cease to be when that is done, Or another consciousness With the self-same forms impress? Doth yon fireball, poised in air, Hang by my permission there? Are the clouds that wander by But the offspring of mine eye, Born with every glance I cast, Perishing when that is past? And those thousand, thousand eyes, Scattered through the twinkling skies, Do they draw their life from mine, Or of their own beauty shine? Now I close my eyes, my ears, And creation disappears; Yet if! but speak the word, All creation is restored. Or, more wonderful, within New creations do begin; Hues more bright and forms more rare Than reality doth wear Flash across my inward sense, Born of the mind's omnipotence. Soul! that all informest, say! Shall these glories pass away? Will those planets cease to blaze When these eyes no longer gaze And the life of things be o'er When these pulses beat no more?
Thought! that in me works and lives, Life to all things living gives, Art thou not thyself, perchance, But the universe in trance? A reflection inly flung By that world thou fanciedst sprung From thyself - thyself a dream Of the world's thinking thou the theme. Be it thus, or be thy birth From a source above the earth Be thou matter, be thou mind, In thee alone myself I find, And through thee alone, for me, Hath this world reality. Therefore, in thee will I live, To thee all myself will give, Losing still, that I may find This bounded self in boundless Mind. The appendix to Transcendentalist Songs contains two brief songs that I wrote many years ago, and which have been folded into the collection in tonight's performance. One is a quick setting of a little poem found in Thoreau's Journal of 1838, which I set in 1984 when I was first considering a Transcendentalist song cycle: In the Busy Streets In the busy streets, domains of trade, Man is a surly porter, or a vain and hectoring bully, Who can claim no nearer kindredship with me Than brotherhood by law. The other is a poem by Ellen Sturgis Hooper (1812-1848), friend of Margaret Fuller and Emerson, which was published in The Dial in 1840: I Slept, and Dreamed that Life Was Beauty I slept, and dreamed that life was Beauty; I woke, and found that life was Duty. Was thy dream then a shadowy lie? Toil on, sad heart, courageously, And thou shalt find thy dream to be A noonday light and truth to thee.
01;Lmposium o� crJontempor:ar:y- e/Uusic Guest Composers Performers Scholars •
•
1952-2016 1952: Earl George, Grant Fletcher,
Burrill Phillips
1987: Jan Bach 1988: John Beall
1953: Anthony Donato, Homer Keller
1989:
Hale Smith
1954: Normand Lockwood,
1990:
Karel Husa
Robert Palmer
1991: Alice Parker
1955: Wallingford Riegger, Peter Mennin
1993:
(Spring) Alexander Aslamazov
1956: Hunter Johnson, Ulysses Kay
1993:
(Fall) Leslie Bassett,
1957: Ernst Krenek, William Bergsma
John Crawford (Society of
1958: Aaron Copland
Composers,
1959: Paul Pisk, George Rochberg
Inc. Region 5 Conference)
1960: 1962:
Roy Harris
1995: David Diamond
Robert Erickson, George Rochberg,
1996: Morton Gould Memorial Concert
Glenn Glasow 1963: Robert Wykes,
Alabama String Quartet 1964: Robert Wykes, E. J. Ulrich,
Salvatore Martirano, Herbert Briin, Ben Johnston 1966: Louis Coyner, Edwin Harkins,
Philip Winsor, 'Edwin London 1967: Frederick Tillis, Geprge Crumb
1997: Joseph Schwantner 1998: Arvo Part 1999: John Corigliano 2000:
Libby Larsen
2001: William Bolcom, Joan Morris 2002: Present Music 2003: Mario Lavista,
Carmen Helena Tellez 2004:
1968: lain Hamilton
Louis Andriessen, James Quandt, Monica Germino,Cristina Zavalloni
1969: The Loop Group, DePaul University
2005: Vince Mendoza
1970: Halim El-Dabh, Oily Wilson
2006: New York New Music Ensemble
1971: Edward J. Miller
2007: Stephen Paulus
1972: Stravinsky Memorial Concert
2008:
1973: Courtney Cox, Phil Wilson 1974: Scott Huston
(Spring) Roderik de Man,
Annelie de Man (Amsterdam) 2008:
1975: David Ward-Steinman
(Fall) John Sharpley, Orchid Ensemble
1976: Donald Erb
2009:
1977:
2011: Yang Xiaozhong, Song Mingzhu,
Lou Harrison, Ezra Sims
ONIX (Mexico City)
1978: M. William Karlins
Zhou Tianli (Sichuan Conservatory
1979:
of Music)
Leonard B. Meyer
1981: Walter S. Hartley
2012:
1982: David Ward-Steinman
2012:
1983:
George Crumb Concert
1984: Robert Bankert, Abram M. Plum,
R. Bedford Watkins
(Spring) Shulamit Ran (Fall) Chinary Ung, Susan Ung,
Adam Greene, Stacey Fraser, Jocelyn Chang 2014: John Daversa
1985: Michael Schelle
2015: Fifth House Ensemble
1986: Jean Eichelberger Ivey
2016: Kyle Gann