Yale Percussion Group, Dec 8, 2018

Robert Blocker, Dean

ysm ensembles

Yale Percussion Group Robert van Sice, director Saturday, December 8, 2018 | 7:30 pm | Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall

Mauricio Kagel 1931–2008

Dressur (1977) Arlo Shultis, percussion Russell Fisher, percussion Youngkyoung Lee, percussion

intermission

Iannis Xenakis 1922–2001

Rebonds B (1987–1989) Shiqi Zhong, percussion

Keith Jarrett b. 1945

The Köln Concert (1975) Part IIc Ji Su Jung, marimba

James Wood b. 1953

Village Burial with Fire (1989) Ji Su Jung, percussion Arlo Shultis, percussion Kevin Zetina, percussion Youngkyoung Lee, percussion

As a courtesy to others, please silence all devices. Photography and recording of any kind is strictly prohibited. Please do not leave the hall during musical selections. Thank you.

Artist Profiles Yale Percussion Group

Robert van Sice, director

Founded in 1997 by Robert van Sice, the Yale Percussion Group has been called “something truly extraordinary” by composer Steve Reich. The ensemble is composed of talented and dedicated young artists who have come from around the world for graduate study at the Yale School of Music.

Robert van Sice, one of the world’s foremost performers of contemporary music for marimba, has premiered more than one hundred works throughout the world. He has appeared as a soloist with many major symphony orchestras as well as Europe’s leading contemporary music ensembles, including the London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Contrechamps in Geneva, and L’Itineraire in Paris. He has given recitals throughout Europe, North America, Africa, and the Far East, and has appeared as a soloist with renowned percussion ensembles Amadinda, Kroumata, Tambuco, Percussive Rotterdam, and Sō Percussion.

In recent seasons, the YPG has performed in Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, Galapagos Art Space, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The ensemble won the Percussive Arts Society competition in 2009 and 2014. A concert in 2012 called “75/100” celebrated the birthdays of Steve Reich and John Cage. The Zankel Hall concert was part of the Yale in New York concert series.

Members of the YPG have gone on to form such acclaimed ensembles as Sō Percussion and Sandbox. YPG alumni have also performed with such ensembles as Lincoln Center’s Chamber Music Two, the Carnegie Hall Academy Ensemble, the Oslo Philharmonic, and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.

Van Sice has performed at such festivals as Ars Musica, Blossom, Darmstadt Course for New Music, Archipel, London Meltdown, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, and others.

He has given more than four hundred master classes in twenty-five countries and has released six CDs on the Etcetera, Mode, and New World labels.

Van Sice is Lecturer in Percussion and Director of the Yale Percussion Group at the Yale School of Music, and is also on the faculties of the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University and the Curtis Institute of Music. For the past fifteen years, van Sice has collaborated with the Adams Corporation in the Netherlands in the design of a series of marimbas bearing his name.

Program Notes Dressur Kagel Jacob Cooper German-Argentine composer Mauricio Kagel (1931–2008) was one of the most intriguing composers of the twentieth century. Many of his diverse works contain undercurrents of surrealism and anarchism in an effort to shed light on — and often confront — the musical tradition. His film Ludwig Van refashions Beethoven scores as furniture; his chamber work Der Schall employs cash registers and household appliances as its main instruments; and in his anti-opera Staatstheater, members of the chorus perform overlapping solos, soloists sing in a chorus, and non-dancers present a ballet.

The half-hour percussion trio Dressur (1977) is rooted in Kagel’s concern for how audio recordings have altered the tradition of audience experience. “In the nineteenth century people still enjoyed music with their eyes as well, with all their senses,” Kagel noted. “Only with the increasing dominance of the mechanical reproduction of music, through broadcast and records, was this reduced to the purely acoustical dimension. What I want is to bring the audience back to an enjoyment of music with all senses. That’s why my music is a direct, exaggerated protest against the mechanical reproduction of music.”

Like many of the other works in Kagel’s “instrumental theater” idiom, Dressur therefore combines the visual element with the auditory, the theatrical with the musical.

Utilizing over fifty instruments and noninstruments, Kagel creates sound out of

theater (such as when a percussionist slams a chair on the ground several times), and theater out of sound (such as when castanets mimic the sound of a typewriter). The percussionist is a particularly fitting conduit for the visual-aural convergence: even in the most traditional works, his or her striking a variety of instruments, often while clearly visible behind several seated performers, seems to possess an inherent theatricality.

Interestingly, Dressur has become something of a YouTube hit lately, with a handful of recorded performances (many by Yale’s own performers) totaling several thousand hits.

If technological advances in the twentieth century resulted in audiences listening without seeing, those in the twenty-first may help bring us “back to an enjoyment of music with all senses.”

Rebonds B xenakis James Harley After his first pieces for percussion ensemble, Persephassa (1969), and percussion solo, Psappha (1976), Iannis Xenakis went on to compose a number of other works for various combinations of percussion or percussion and other instruments. His second solo work, though, did not arrive until 1988.

Rebonds was written for longtime colleague Sylvio Gualda, who had also premiered Psappha and performed it (and other pieces) to great acclaim around the world. This piece is less ambitious (and utopic, in terms of performer difficulty!) than the earlier solo, but it is nonetheless a fascinating study of pulse and pattern.

Unusually for Xenakis, Rebonds is written as two autonomous movements. They can be performed in either order. In “B,” the most obvious formal distinction is between sections featuring drums or sections featuring woodblocks (the final section combines the two). The organization within these sections is less linear than in “A,” but there are variational processes used. The ongoing pulse is occasionally vaporized by the switch to continuous rolls, but there are also passages in which the layered succession of patterns creates fascinating textures of shifting accents.

The Köln Concert jarrett The Köln Concert is a performance of solo piano improvisations performed at the Opera House in Cologne (German: Köln) on January 24, 1975. A notable aspect of the concert was Jarrett’s ability to produce very extensive improvised material over a vamp of one or two chords for prolonged periods of time. Unlike the other parts of this concert, “Part II”, the encore, was based on a precomposed tune, the form and melody of which can be found in certain Real Book compilations as “Memories of Tomorrow.”

Tonight’s performance is derived from a transcription by Manuel Barrueco.

Village Burial with Fire wood James Wood Paul Klee used to refer to his own work as “abstract with memories.” I hope he will allow me to borrow the term, at least in this instance.

Here the memories are of a Hindu, princely funeral ceremony – for two months the villagers have been making preparations – hundreds have turned out wearing their most lavish and colourful clothes, and carrying offerings of food on their heads. First there is the noisy procession down to the river for purification of the soul, then a short ceremony, and then the vast funeral pyre is set alight. At this moment it seems as though the whole village has exploded into music and dancing – some go into trance. Gradually the physical form of the pyre disintegrates, and the spirit of the deceased is formally set free to mingle with the spirit world.

In the evening, when the festivities have moved on to another place, some mourners lament beside the glowing embers.

Village Burial with Fire was commissioned by the Hungarian percussion group Amadinda for the 1989 Arts Council Contemporary Music Network, with funds provided by the Arts Council of Great Britain. The first nine performances were given by Amadinda during their Arts Council tour of Britain during November 1989 in London, Leicester, Winchester, Cheltenham, Bristol, Manchester, Durham, Sheffield, and Huddersfield.

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