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PROGRAM
Ari Sussman (b. 1993)
Nico Muhly (b. 1981)
Ken Thomson (b. 1976)
Amy Beth Kirsten (b. 1972)
to no end (2023)
Doublespeak (2012)
Storm Drain (2010)
My Charming Murderer, from Colombine’s Paradise Theatre (2012, arr. 2020)
Viet Cuong (b. 1990)
David Lang (b. 1957)
Joan Tower (b. 1938)
Electric Aroma (2017, arr. 2018)
intertext, from composition as explanation (2016)
Into the Night (2023)
PROGRAM NOTES
Chamber music has long been an important vehicle for the most innovative developments in musical style. It was in his piano sonatas and string quartets, after all, that Beethoven first developed his late style, long before attempting his radical experiments in large, public works like the Ninth Symphony and Missa solemnis . Stravinsky’s first full-fledged Neoclassical work was his Octet, and Schoenberg’s famously atonal Pierrot lunaire is composed for a unique ensemble of six performers combining voice, winds, strings, and piano. This evening’s concert by Eighth Blackbird carries on this venerable legacy, featuring seven recently composed works— each commissioned or co-commissioned by the ensemble— that represent the heterogeneous landscape of American music in the 21st century.
While avant-garde music has a reputation for being difficult, the composers on this evening’s program follow in the footsteps of late–20th-century postmodernists who strove to create cutting-edge music that remained nonetheless accessible. They deliberately rejected the jarring, dissonant, and largely impenetrable high-modernist styles like total serialism. Instead, American composers like Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass created a new minimalist style that was repetitive, polyrhythmic, and generally consonant. In addition to the rise of minimalism, American experimentalism—in the tradition of the quirky music of Charles Ives and John Cage—experienced its own postmodern turn as composers abandoned abstract objectivity in favor of expressive personal works in familiar idioms, such the Neoromanticism of George Rochberg and Joan Tower (whose work is featured in tonight’s concert).
The composers on this evening’s program are inheritors of these two streams. On the one hand, Lang, Thomson, Sussman, and Muhly lean on the stylistic conventions of the minimalists: broadly consonant harmonies, layered polyrhythms, and stable, directionless tonalities. On the other hand, Tower, Kirsten, and Cuong represent the individualistic wing of American experimentalism, each with a unique compositional voice that nonetheless makes reference to Western classical music and remains approachable.
ARI SUSSMAN to no end
Musicologist Richard Taruskin once coined the term “holy minimalism” to describe the way the style took on spiritual overtones for some composers and audiences. Although Taruskin was referring to the tintinnabulation works of Arvo Pärt, Sussman’s to no end falls under this umbrella. In his program note, Sussman writes, “While I am by no means religious, I do consider myself a proud cultural and spiritual Jewish American. Naturally, I often gravitate toward and find fascination and solace in traditional Jewish music and chant … Without giving too much away, to no end paraphrases the cantillation chants of two excerpted verses of the Book of Genesis regarding the stars and celestial beings … While both verses are similar in tone, meaning, sentiment, and nature, the perpetual and unremitting chant-like melodies serve as the foundation for this work; it is constantly evolving by building, compressing, deconstructing, decompressing, ‘melting,’ and mutating.”
In to no end , Sussman creates a harmonious, ethereal environment of repetitive piano, harp, and marimba lines based on the cantillation melody. This main melodic line is accompanied by spatial effects from the woodwinds and resonant harmonics from the violin. The work avoids almost all dissonance even when staggered entrances of the melody notably create a canon. The total consonance and subtle transitions of the work avoid any narrative conventions, instead creating an ambient, heavenly sound world free of conflict.
NICO MUHLY Doublespeak
A former copyist for Philip Glass, Muhly’s musical style features the hallmarks of minimalism, especially what he considers its focus on “obsessive” repetition. Yet he uses the stylistic features of minimalism freely, without much philosophical allegiance to the radical paring down that inspired it. He has worked in commercial “pop” music— producing tracks for Björk and releasing albums that include a recent collaborative project with Bryce Dessner, Sufjan Stevens, and James McAlister called Planetarium —as well as contemporary classical, composing operas, orchestral works, and chamber music, and music for film and television.
While Glass’s influence can always be heard in Muhly’s music, Doublespeak is specifically dedicated to him for a 75th birthday celebration. The piece uses quotations from the heyday of minimalism in the 1970s and ’80s. Although the score only notes extensive quotations from Glass’s Music for 12 Parts , other brief references include the arpeggiated solo line of Glass’s Violin Concerto and the harmonically stagnant, mixed-meter violin-and-castanet opening of John Adams’s Short Ride in a Fast Machine . Muhly offers no explanation of the title in the score, but the conventional meaning of doublespeak—a euphemistic manipulation of words to convey an opposite meaning—suggests the quotations in the work are not meant to carry the same implications as they do in their original context. Indeed, the work opens darkly with aggressively obsessive polyrhythmic layers punctuated by percussion and crashing piano, subverting the calm of many minimalist works. Despite moments of reprieve from the obsessive drive, the work continues in this mood until the piano introduces the melody from Music for 12 Parts that ultimately takes over, gradually loosening the strict rhythmic pulse to arrive at a free-floating closure.
KEN THOMSON Storm Drain
Ken Thomson plays bass clarinet in Bang on a Can and is music director of the Asphalt Orchestra. He comes from the world of jazz composition, but his music—like that of many composers in the jazz world today—defies the stereotypes of the genre. In works for his album Sextet , he uses conventional jazz-combo instrumentation, harmonies, and idiomatic swing motives; however, he subjects these materials to minimalist repetitive processes to create polyrhythmic blocks that act as refrains between improvised solos. He also composes works squarely in the contemporary classical world, working with the renowned JACK Quartet for his album Thaw , for example.
Storm Drain bears little resemblance to jazz. The work features a looping violin that creates a steady, rhythmically layered accompaniment above the melodic line, which is played by the bass clarinet and the violin. The layering effect builds to a point of saturation in the middle of the work when the looping stops, and the bass clarinet and violin play a slow, tensile contrapuntal duet. The looping then starts again, layering on more lines and leading to a climactic ending.
AMY BETH KIRSTEN
“My Charming Murderer,” from Colombine’s Paradise Theatre
Amy Beth Kirsten has been slow to embrace the title of composer: Her whimsical art consists of elaborate staged works that combine music, acting, vocalization, and costuming, and eschews simple narratives in favor of more associative, conceptual organization. In her scores, she includes extensive instructions for the performers, describing not only the vocalization and theatrical staging of her works, but also artistic directions, like intentionally making ugly sounds.
In the larger work from which “My Charming Murderer” is taken, Colombine’s Paradise Theatre , each performer, wearing a mask, acts as a stock character from 17th-century commedia dell’arte . The work tells the story of a woman (Colombine) and her two suitors (Harlequin and Pierrot) in an episodic dreamscape. In “My Charming Murderer,” the heroine pianist sings the story of an alluring suitor in a declamatory style that is pensive and cumbersome, while the other instruments punctuate her tune with atmospheric effects and emotive interjections. When the singing stops, the music shifts to a fun, indeed charming, carnivalesque middle section. But despite the playful appearance, the work sonically depicts the woman’s murder, heard in the wailing and screaming woodwinds, before slowly resolving to silence.
VIET CUONG Electric Aroma
Viet Cuong teaches composition, orchestration, and music theory at the University of Nevada. He has written several works for wind bands, and his music has been performed by Dallas Winds, the “President’s Own” Marine Band, “Pershing’s Own” Army Band, and the United States Navy Band. He has held residencies with the Pacific Symphony, California Symphony, Copland House, and Atlantic Center for the Arts. While his musical style is beholden to the modernist experimentalist tradition, especially in his exploration of extended instrumental techniques, his goal is to take unusual sounds and compose them in a way that highlights their beauty.
Electric Aroma takes its title from a 1936 quote from Pablo Picasso: “an electric aroma, a most disagreeable noise.”
Certainly, it is not hard to hear this work as full of disagreeable noise. Cuong has both the clarinet and soprano saxophone deploy multiphonics (when a solo wind instrument plays more than one note at a time by activating overtones or humming into the instrument while playing). The effect can be like distortion on an electric guitar. On top of the woodwind multiphonics, the marimba is also bowed to create overtonerich accentuation for the melody. Despite these potentially disagreeable sounds, the work is truly an infectious romp: A driving tango rhythm holds the piece together as the interlocking woodwind parts create the compound melody. According to his website, Cuong “enjoys exploring the unexpected and whimsical, and he is often drawn to projects where he can make peculiar combinations and sounds feel enchanting or oddly satisfying,” and that is precisely what his disagreeable noise, his Electric Aroma , accomplishes.
DAVID
LANG “intertext,” from composition as explanation
David Lang’s style combines influences of minimalism, experimentalism, classic rock, and other genres with the belief that all musical styles are fundamentally equal. He has composed operas, orchestral works, and chamber music, winning a Pulitzer Prize for the little match girl passion . His website describes his style as “by turns ominous, ethereal, urgent, hypnotic, unsettling, and very emotionally direct.”
“intertext” is the eighth movement—and only purely instrumental movement—from Lang’s Gertrude Stein–inspired theater piece composition as explanation . The larger work draws from a speech composed by Stein in which she narrates (in stream of consciousness) the chasm between the writing process and the final written output. According to Lang, “She has blurred the relationship between her content, her form, and her performance, in much the same way I have tried to blur the musicality of Eighth Blackbird.” composition as explanation is a staged theatrical performance with extensive instructions from Lang encouraging performers to hire a stage director and an acting coach. Each performer gives speeches and vocalizes during the performance. In “intertext,” however, the speakers fall silent, and the movement is a lulling and harmonious meditation in which the paired instruments each maintain their own repetitive metric profiles, layered atop each other. Although similar to Sussman’s ambient style in to
no end , Lang’s “intertext” always conveys a sense of direction despite its lack of drama.
JOAN TOWER Into the Night
Joan Tower has been a leading American composer for the last half-century. Her earliest compositions focused on chamber music, written for the Da Capo Ensemble that she co-founded. Her career took off in the 1980s when she started writing large-ensemble works for major American orchestras: works that include Sequoia, Silver Ladders , and her Pulitzer Prize–finalist Violin Concerto. Her Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman , a series of six individual fanfares composed between 1987 and 2014, celebrates six women in music whom she admires as risk-takers. Describing her own compositions as risky, she composes by following her own intuitive bottom-up path rather than mapping out large structures.
Into the Night grew out of her recently composed cello concerto, which she worked on during the pandemic in 2020. She explains, “The title was taken from the last movement of my cello concerto A New Day —which is dedicated to my husband Jeff of 50 years, who passed away last year. During his last two years, I never knew whether I would wake up to find him alive or not. So the nights were hard and a new day became a treasured day for us.” The work opens with slow ascending lines reaching upward that sound simultaneously ominous and optimistic, like a Wagnerian prelude. A series of distinct solos for each instrument, generally alternating between fast and slow, follows. The lulling clarinet solo is met with a driving, chromatic violin solo. The flute’s rhapsodic episode leads into a return of the clarinet now playing scalar runs. The opening material rounds out the work, as the ascending lines become a welcome denouement.
ARTIST BIO
EIGHTH BLACKBIRD
Eighth Blackbird moves music forward through innovative performance, advocacy for music by living creatives, and its growing legacy of guiding an emerging generation of artists.
Eighth Blackbird, “a brand-name defined by adventure, vibrancy and quality” (Detroit Free Press) and hailed as “one of the smartest, most dynamic ensembles on the planet” (Chicago Tribune), was founded in 1996 and continues today under the leadership of collaborative directors Lisa Kaplan and Matthew Duvall.
Accolades include: Four Grammy Awards for Best Small Ensemble/Chamber Music Performance | The MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions | The Concert Artists Guild Competition Grand Prize | The Musical America Ensemble of the Year | The Chamber Musica America Visionary Award | The APRA AMCOS Art Music Awards Performance of the Year
Creative output includes: Commissions and world premieres of hundreds of works by established and emerging composer | Fully produced theatrical chamber music productions | Chamber concertos with both orchestras and bands | An extensive recording catalog In addition to chamber music performance, the members of Eighth Blackbird value their roles as curators, educators and mentors. Beginning exclusively as a chamber music ensemble, Eighth Blackbird has expanded in recent years to represent multiple mission-driven initiatives: Eighth Blackbird | Blackbird IV | The Blackbird Creative Lab | The Chicago Artists Workshop | Blackbird Productions.
The name “Eighth Blackbird” derives from the eighth stanza of Wallace Stevens’s evocative, imagistic poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird: “I know noble accents / And lucid, inescapable rhythms; / But I know, too, / That the blackbird is involved / In what I know.”
eighthblackbird.org
Eighth Blackbird is managed by Epstein Fox Performances LLC. Matthew Duvall proudly endorses Pearl Drums and Adams Musical Instruments, Vic Firth Sticks and Mallets, Zildjian Cymbals, and Black Swamp Percussion Accessories. Lisa Kaplan is a Steinway Artist.
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