Overture
In this issue: Dallas Museum of Art & Cowboys Stadium, Nouveau 47, South Dallas Concert Choir, Couture Music, Soriano and Plata, Arsenic and Old Lace
Dallas / Fort Worth • wrr101.com
WRR Classical 101.1 FM
February 2011
A Monthly publication For Friends of WRR
Getting Police’d on D’Drum
B e s t - k n o w n around the world as the groundbreaking drummer for the legendary band The Police, Stewart Copeland has also created a substantial body of work for classical ensembles. His recent commission for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra premiered Feb. 3-6 at the Meyerson Symphony Center. Kurt Rongey, WRR’s Program Director, had the opportunity to interview Copeland before the concert. KR: Tell us what this piece is called and do your best to describe it. SC: It’s called Gamalan D’Drum. The gamelan originates in Indonesia on a tiny island called Bali. It’s an orchestra of bell instruments, very exotic and sophisticated harmonically. I’ve been listening to this stuff since college in the Nonesuch Explorer series. The folks from the Dallas Symphony came to me with this concept for the ensemble D’Drum. They have a set of these instruments in concert pitch, which for the first time makes
it possible to really write a piece for gamelan and orchestra. Music has been written for these instruments and orchestra before, but the tuning has always been funky and it’s always been limited in its scope. KR: Are all the members of D’Drum playing the gamelan instruments? Yes, and various other instruments. The gamelan bells are the star of the show, but they have all kinds of oddly shaped drums and other pitched instruments as well as cymbals and other gongs. It’s kind of a motley array of inanimate objects upon which they will aggress mightily. There are five in all, five crazy Texans who just love Balinese music. They’ve been going out there studying this stuff for 20 years. I think they’ve learned a lot of the language, certainly a lot of the musical language. I had to catalog what exact pitch each bell makes so that I can compose music for them. I took a little handheld movie camera and filmed each bell with them hitting it. Then I carved up those as samples and used those to compose the music. Actually writing the music was not
such a big deal, but it took another two years to create the score. KR: Do you incorporate other ethnic styles? The ethnic style of it is American, because that’s who I am. The instrument is an extremely exotic ethnic instrument, but I haven’t really attempted to reproduce classical Balinese music; that would be fake. I’m going after the instrument itself. The western orchestra is also not Indonesian. So the music is American, but it has this inescapable flavor. The music will be more familiar, but the sound will be strange. When you get five wild-eyed Texans blasting away on these things, it’s pretty darn exciting. And then you get Jaap on the podium there, leading that huge orchestra… it’s going to be a big night. You can find a recording of this entire interview at wrr101.com/podcasts and be sure to listen March 21 at 8 p.m. for a rebroadcast of this concert.
Still on point 50 years later
A vision at 50
The Texas Ballet Theater was founded by Margo Dean in 1961 as the Fort Worth Ballet. It became a professional ballet company in 1985. In 1988 the company began adding performances in Dallas and was renamed Texas Ballet Theater in 2003. Ben Stevenson and the dancers of Texas Ballet Theater are celebrating 50 years of world-class ballet for A Weekend of Dance, featuring Balanchine’s Theme and Variations, Stevenson’s Four Last Songs, and two World Premieres: one by Ben Stevenson, accompanied by the Booker T. Washington Jazz Ensemble, and one by Company dancer Peter Zweifel. Celebrate Texas Ballet Theater’s 50th Anniversary February 18-20 at Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth and March 4-6 at the Winspear Opera House in Dallas. Call 877828-9200 or visit texasballettheater.org for tickets.
In 1961 the Amon Carter Museum of American Art opened its doors. By making provisions in his will, businessman and philanthropist Amon G. Carter had assured that a museum free and open to the public to house his collection of works by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell would be built. “It is my purpose to erect and equip a museum and present it to the city of Fort Worth,” he wrote the city manager in 1950. The council quickly complied, and the bedrock of Carter’s gift to the town he loved was secured. As he clearly suspected, Carter did not live to see his dream fulfilled. His daughter, Ruth Carter Stevenson (b. 1923), and son, Amon G. Carter Jr. (1919–1982), carried out their father’s wishes by seeing that his museum was realized. Stevenson and her brother, in concert with the foundation Carter established ten years prior to his death, selected Philip Johnson (1906–2005), winner of the first Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1979 and architect of several prominent DFW buildings including The Crescent Hotel, Kennedy Memorial, Momentum Place (Comerica Bank Tower) and Thanks-Giving Square, to design the new museum. The museum’s rise from a 20,000-square-foot structure housing a collection of western art to a building nearly four times that size with some 250,000 objects of American art is a testament to the museum’s consistent leadership and ambitious drive over the decades. The museum is now among the nation’s principal repositories of American art. Today a dozen exhibitions each year, drawn from the permanent collection and other premier museums across the country, entice visitors from around the world to visit the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. The museum is still free to the public. Lecture series, extended education opportunities, films, family events, and interactive tours are just part of the array of free programming the museum offers. After fifty years, Amon G. Carter’s gift to the city of Fort Worth keeps on giving, just as the man himself first envisioned and dreamed that it would.
African American Repertory Theater founder Irma P. Hall Irma P. Hall, who helped found the African American Repertory Theater in DeSoto, stars in Flyin’ West by Pearl Cleage at The Corner Theatre. Hear the interview with Hall and WRR’s Tempie Lindsey during The Classic Cafe Live from One Arts Plaza at wrr101.com/podcasts. The play, set in Kansas in 1898, portrays the rich history and unique challenges of a small group of black women who dared to seize the opportunity of a new law that opened up vast acres of land to people willing to simply “go west” and build Irma P. Hall new lives for their families. Flyin’ West runs Feb. 4-27. More details can be found at aareptheater.com.
Overture • February 2011
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