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CHRIS DEBLASIO (1959-1993)
was composer of the musical Instant Lives (1984), based
on the poetry and prose of Howard Moss, and the operetta
A Murder is Foretold (1984), suggested by an Oscar Wilde
story, with a libretto by Sharon Holland. He received
commissions from Trinity Church (New York), Union
Theological Seminary, the New Orleans Gay Men's Chorus,
and various instrumentalists and singers. He provided
scores for the off-off-Broadway and off-Broadway plays
Stray Dog Story, Night Sweat, and Adam and the Experts,
and served as composer-in-residence for the Williamstown
Theater Festival's Second Company. He created
arrangements for the late Martha Schlamme, and served as
arranger and conductor at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the
Park, the Chelsea Theater Center, and Mabou Mines. His
song cycle All The Way Through Evening, is a setting of
texts by the New York City-based author and poet Perry
Brass. Chris was an early member of ACT-UP/New York and
is survived by his lover William Berger.
PERRY BRASS has
published seven books including a book of poems,
Sex-charge, a novel Albert or The Book of Man, Out There,
Stories of Private Desires, Horror, and the Afterlife;
and his forthcoming novel The Harvest, all from Bellhue
Press. His musical collaborations include work with
composers Ricky Ian Gordon, Fred Hersch, Chris Berg, and
Craig Carnahan. Perry Brass resides in New York City.
All The Way Through
Evening (1990)
Five Nocturnes for Baritone and Piano
My "intentions" with the composer Chris
DeBlasio, that we write something to do with AIDS, began
almost four years before he died. At that time I knew
that he had been diagnosed and was in treatment to fight
complications associated with the AIDS virus. He was,
virtually, at Ground Zero of the crisis: active in Act
Up, and writing about AIDS and AIDS drugs for various
papers and magazines. Artistically, he was depressed. He
told me that he did not "want to touch the
material." It was too close to home. I left his
apartment very discouraged. Then, about a year later,
before my forty-third birthday, he called to tell me that
he had set five of my poems.
"I'm calling the cycle All The Way Through Evening.
You asked me to do something about AIDS and this is
it." He then told me the names of the poems and how
they fit together-and I saw that he had taken a sheaf of
my work and had recognized a relationship between the
words, the age that we are now living in, and his own
feelings about a disease that would kill him. I did not
question how he got the courage to do this: to confront
his own fears of dealing with this thing, "to keep
its lowering darkness somewhere just above (his)
head," but I was jubilant. I told him that this was
the best birthday present I'd received in years. I
hadn1t even heard the piece, but I knew it would be
wonderful; I knew that it would be everything that we
wanted it to be. And-frankly-I needed it. Chris knew it
had been a discouraging year for me. I had just moved out
of New York and felt marooned in suburban Connecticut (I
was not making the adjustment well), and my left arm was
in a cast after seriously breaking it Rollerblading-the
travails of the middle-aged athlete!
A few weeks later, I went up to Chris's small apartment
on Thompson Street and met Michael Dash, for whom the
cycle had been written. I sat down, Chris began playing,
and I broke into tears by the time Michael reached the
last song, "Walt Whitman in 1989." I was
speechless "What do you think?" Chris asked. I
could barely say a word, and Michael said: "We1ve
felt the same way about it several times-lots of
tears."
Although Chris had set other poems of mine, we knew from
the start that All The Way Through Evening was
significant. In these songs, he contracted his own
expression and gift. As he told me, "I realize it1s
now or never. I'm not going to have years ahead of
me," I think this contributed to the sense of
immediacy the cycle conveys: the sense of crisis, of
undammable feelings. Michael understood this as well; he
said to me that first day: "These songs have to do
with my life; with all of our lives." And he was
right. Although the cycle has been sung by some wonderful
singers and each one has found something different in it,
each has also experienced a totality of grief,
heartbreak, and human attachment, the very emotions at
the core of All The Way Through Evening. The piece, in
short, has been more than the sum of its three special
parts: words, music, and performance. It is held together
by feelings and love and understanding.
Chris made these poems that were once so personal to me
universal; he made them sing from his own heart things
that are difficult for us to express; the struggle to
give up consciousness ("The Disappearance of
Light"), to be open emotionally to another person in
a world that controls and dismisses our attachments
("Train Station"), to identify with another
artist who has died of AIDS ("An Elegy to Paul
Jacobs"), to become part of a community of men
("Poussin"), and finally to merge oneself with
a hidden story of grief and its transcendence ("Walt
Whitman in 1989").
Each of the poems had a special meaning for me, and it
was a part of my relationship with Chris that he
understood them with no explanations-that we could share
the poetry on a level of pure emotion. Later, he asked me
why I had written the first poem, "The Disappearance
of Light," because that was something he feared
himself. I said that in my early 30s, I often didn1t
want to go to sleep. I would stay up and listen to the
movement of my own thoughts, to the flow of consciousness
itself. He said that he shared the same feelings and that
as burdensome as consciousness was, it was painful to
have let it go. He knew that soon he would have to, and
it gnawed on him that in dying so young-at thirty four-he
would not have that much to leave behind. He felt that
All The Way Through Evening would probably be the piece
for which he would be remembered; that might be performed
the most. Because of the cycle, especially "Walt
Whitman 1989," which was chosen for "The AIDS
Quilt Songbook," he began to get the recognition
that he deserved. This included several new commissions.
But he decided that with his last bit of energy, he had
to complete the orchestration of the songs. He did this
hardly more than six months before he died, and his dying
wish was to hear All The Way Through Evening performed
with a full orchestra. Both Michael and Chris contacted
many orchestras, circulating the music, building up
interest whenever possible. Finally on the day of Chris's
death, Michael appeared in his hospital room to tell him
that Michael Morgan, the conductor of the Cosmopolitan
Symphony Orchestra, had agreed to conduct the orchestral
version on March 4, 1994. Chris who had been barely
conscious, heard the news and smiled. Michael whose lush
baritone voice had inspired Chris to write the cycle,
premiered the orchestral version as well. It was at Town
Hall, for this premiere, that many of us in the audience
realized Michael was sick as well-his weight loss was too
apparent. Now both Chris and Michael are gone and of the
three of us in Chris's apartment that first afternoon,
only I remain. But on this CD you can hear again two of
the original creators of this song cycle at work, all the
way through evening.
- Perry Brass
C. BRYAN RULON
was born in a small farming community in Indiana. By good
fortune, he took piano lessons with a local teacher who
recognized his creative and imaginative gifts and
encouraged his interest in composing as well as
performing. His parents, though not musicians themselves,
were also supportive, often dropping Bryan off at
Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra concerts where he
developed his love of musical timbre and orchestral
texture.
Rulon attended Indiana University School of Music,
receiving his BM in Composition and a double MM with
distinction in Composition and Electronic and Computer
Music. He also served there as Associate Instructor and
Director of the Electronic Music Ensembles.
Upon completing these studies, Bryan moved to New York
City with longtime friend, painter Layman Foster, to
embark upon the bohemian life of an artist in the
cultural capital of the world. In 1982, Rulon with oboist
Matt Sullivan, co-founded First Avenue (joined soon after
by William Kannar, bassist and computer software
designer), an electro-acoustic improvisational ensemble
working with actors, dancers, clowns, painters,
performance artists, stage and lighting designers, as
well as internationally prominent and emerging
composer/performers.
Rulon has received numerous awards and commissions
including music for Bill T. Jones' "Corporate
Whimsey" which won the 1984 National College Dance
Festival and was performed at the Kennedy Center in
Washington, DC. He won the 1988 Pittsburgh New Music
Ensemble's Harvey Gaul Prize and was finalist in the 1990
Olympia International Composer Competition. He has also
received a 1992 commission grant from the New York State
Council on the Arts, a 1994 National Endowment for the
Arts Composer Fellowship Grant, a 1995 Fromm Foundation
Commission, a 1996 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 1996
Chamber Music America Commission for the New Millennium
Ensemble. The New York New Music Ensemble half-jokingly
refers to Bryan as their "court composer" with
three commissions for that group, two of which have been
recorded.
Rulon has recently completed a PhD in Composition from
Princeton University and is currently working on a
musical theater work with director/dramaturge Orlando
Ferrand, based on a Freud case history as part of First
Avenue's Freud Fest to be premiered in 1997.
CURTIS BAHN
worked with Charles Dodge as the Technical Director of
the Center for Computer Music at Brooklyn College from
1987 to 1993. He received his undergraduate degree in
jazz studies and performance at Indiana University where
he studied with David Baker and Stuart Sankey, becoming
the fourth string bass player in the history of Indiana
University to be awarded a Performer's Certificate. In
1979 he was the second place winner in the International
Zimmerman/Mingus String Bass Competition hosted by the
International Society of Bassists. In 1987 Mr. Bahn
received a Master of Music degree in Composition from
Brooklyn College where his teachers were Charles Dodge,
Roger Reynolds and Bunita Marcus. His compositions have
been presented at the International Computer Music
Conference (ICMC), the conference of the Society for
Electro-Acoustic Music in America, the Styrian Autumn
Festival in Graz, Austria and numerous other national and
international performances. From 1987 to 1990, Mr. Bahn
was an Instructor of Computer Music and Composition at
New York University. He is currently a Doctoral Fellow at
Princeton University, working with Paul Lansky and Steve
Mackey.
SelfRequiem (1994/95)
Commissioned by Musicians' Accord and Positive Music
SelfRequiem is first and foremost to the memory of my
longtime friend Layman Foster who died of AIDS in May of
1994. His spirit, life and death inform and confirm all
parts of SelfRequiem in my own mind. More generally, it
is about the inner world of anyone with a terminal
illness. Though the piece is not specifically
programmatic, it does have specific metaphoric references
and, in many respects, illustrates certain emotional
states.
After an invocation with the "Preprayer"
introduction, the music expresses the vitality and motion
of an everyday life. This forward movement is abruptly
interrupted upon the entry of Curtis Bahn's beautiful and
haunting tape part, metaphoric of that moment when one is
suddenly confronted with one1s own mortality. At this
point the listener enters an inner world.
What follows is a series of emotional states that reflect
a definite progression as described in Kubler-Ross's book
On Death and Dying. Dr. Kubler-Ross was writing in the
1960's about terminally ill cancer patients. In her
extensive work with these patients, she chronicles a
surprising consistency in the set of psychological and
emotional reactions each patient seems to pass through on
the journey to death. I have taken this extraordinary
existential sequence as a formal template to describe my
understanding of a person dealing with imminent
mortality.
My last few months with Layman confirmed all these states
and perhaps most profoundly the final, serene state of
acceptance. It is my sincere hope that others may find a
comfort and truth in this work: that even in our inner
lives, we are not alone and that others share our
triumphs and sorrows.
- C. Bryan Rulon
LAURA KAMINSKY is
co-founder and current director of Musicians' Accord, and
is an active participant in the new music community as
composer, producer and advocate. In addition to
performances by Musicians' Accord, she has been a
featured composer on concert programs and in festivals
throughout the United States and abroad, including
Europe, Central and South America and Africa. Recent
commissions include "Future Conditional" for
solo piano, commissioned by Composers Forum and The
Kitchen, "Spirit Lost and Found" for solo
guitar with USIA Cultural Ambassador program support,
"Interpolations on Utopia Parkway" for oboe and
piano with support from Boosey & Hawkes/Buffet Crampo
n-Paris and "Elegy for the Silenced Voice: In
Memoriam Michael Dash" for solo trumpet, which was
commissioned by Positive Music. She is currently writing
a work commissioned by the Jubal Trio, "Aluta
Continua."
As a producer/presenter, Kaminsky has received numerous
awards for her innovative programming, including three
from ASCAP/Chamber Music America and one from the Office
of the Manhattan Borough President. As Associate Director
for the Humanities at the 92nd Street Y (1984-88), as
Artistic Director of Town Hall (1988-1992), and as
Director of Music and Theater Programs at The New School
(1993-96), Laura has continuously sought new ways to
challenge performers, stimulate creative dialogue and
bring artists and audiences together. The scope of her
broad-ranging program efforts are evident in their very
titles: the decade-long multi-disciplinary "Century
of Change," the "Ladyfingers Project," the
"Not Just Jazz Festival," "Novels Into
Film," "From Roosevelt to Nixon: The Emergence
of the Imperial Presidency," "Spiritual Hunger
in America," "Oboe Blow-Out" and "The
Hendrix Project," to name but a few. 1992/93 brought
her to Ghana where she taught at The National Academy of
Music, produced concerts and a conference on
"African Music: Traditions and Innovations,"
conducted field research and composed And Trouble Came:
An African AIDS Diary.
And Trouble Came: An
African AIDS Diary
(1993; version for recording, 1996)
Commissioned by Fidelio
And Trouble Came: An African AIDS Diary is the unlikely
product of a commission, a journey and a dream. From
Winneba, Ghana, where I lived, I wrote on 25 April 1993:
"A year in Ghana and a commission to write a piece
about AIDS. How unlikely that these should occur
simultaneously. I arrived in September with some
preliminary thoughts about the texts and music, but it
was only after a remarkable meeting with two dedicated
American nuns and two young African men suffering with
AIDS that I was able to imagine the piece." I had
already selected texts for the piece (three poems and
three Biblical excerpts [which I had liberally altered])
and had begun composing the music, but somehow it was not
coming together as a unified whole; I was struggling with
writer's block. Travelling throughout Ghana, I visited
the nuns, staying in their convent in the rural village
of Berekum. Knowing I was writing a piece dealing with
AIDS, they arranged a meeting with two of their patients.
The men told their life stories; I read my texts. We took
snapshots, cried, and shook hands; I departed. The night
following this profoundly moving encounter, I had a dream
which led me to create the structure of the piece and
which allowed me to continue composing it.
In the dream, narrator Mark Lamos, whom I had not yet
met, was recounting to a rapt audience the story of this
meeting of the nuns, the men and myself. I awoke with a
start, realizing that I needed to write a series of
"diary entries" which would be interwoven with
the texts I had already selected, and that the linkage
would create a dramatic throughline for the work. Writing
text was a new challenge for me, and proved as demanding
as composing music. I especially wish to thank Amy Rubin,
first, for urging me to write prose, and then for her
masterful editing of these diary entries, for both the
1993 and 1996 versions of the piece.
Additional thanks go to the members of Fidelio (Lois,
Harry and Sanda) for commissioning the work, and to Mark
Lamos for help bringing the story to life. Finally, I
would like to acknowledge the many others in Ghana who
provided me the inspiration and encouragement necessary
to the creation of "And Trouble Came": Sisters
Margaret Moran and Dr. Marie Ego for welcoming me into
their world in Berekum and for introducing me to two
special men, Jonathan Anane and Dauda Kramo, who shared
their personal stories of AIDS in Africa with honesty and
dignity; and, finally, Kelly Blanchard, Cyrus Darpoh,
Margaret Adjowa Ferguson, Mary Pat Johnson, Daniel
Kiflejesus, Theodora Entsua Mensah, Amy Rubin and Felix
Tamakloe for creating a special community with me in
Ghana. I am tremendously grateful to all those mentioned
above, and I dedicate this work to them and to all people
suffering with or fighting against AIDS throughout the
world.
- Laura Kaminsky
MUSICIANS' ACCORD:
A New Music Project, currently under the artistic
leadership of composer/producer Laura Kaminsky, was
founded in 1980. The mission of Musicians' Accord is to
promote new music through concerts, recordings,
workshops, master classes, commissioning of new works and
broadcasts. The ensemble presents innovative concerts of
contemporary music from a broad aesthetic spectrum, as
well as classic and unknown 20th century works. It has
performed throughout the New York metropolitan area and
abroad, and has premiered and/or commissioned close to
100 works to date. Composers as diverse as Samuel Barber,
Luciano Berio, Linda Bouchard, John Cage, Aaron Copland,
John Corigliano, Henry Cowell, Mario Davidovsky, David
Del Tredici, Miriam Gideon, Mario Lavista, Tania Leon,
Jing Jing Luo, J.H.K. Nketia, Harry Partch, Astor
Piazzolla, Steve Reich, Amy Rubin, Frederic Rzewski,
Bright Sheng, Sheila Silver, Igor Stravinsky, Joan Tower,
Edgard Varese, Anton Webern and Stefan Wolpe, to list but
a sampling, have all been presented on Musicians' Accord
concerts.
In residence at the City
College of New York since 1984, where ensemble members
work with Distinguished Professor, composer David Del
Tredici and his students, Musicians' Accord has also
served as guest artists at the Juilliard School,
Manhattan School of Music, New York University, Columbia
University, The New School and Fairleigh Dickinson
University, among others.
The ensemble's first
recording, Chamber Music with Voice (and a little jazz)
was released on the Mode label in 1991 (mode 23). With
the release last November of Berio: The Great Works for
Voice, (mode 48), Musicians' Accord inaugurates a
multi-disc recording project with Mode of Berio's music
which will include The Complete Sequenzas and More Great
Works for Voice. Other recording projects include a
two-disc project Transience: The Music of Joel Feigin,
for North/South Records, The Music of Robert Savage (also
two discs), and an upcoming Henry Cowell Centennial disc
in cooperation with Essential Music and the Colorado
String Quartet for the Mode label with project support
from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music Recording Program.
Fidelio formed
during the 1986/87 season when Lois Martin suggested
programming the Brahms "Trio in A minor, Op.
114," with viola substituting for clarinet (Brahms'
own edition), on the Clark-Schuldmann Duo's Chamber Music
Plus Series in Hartford, CT. The success they felt by
audience and artists alike inspired the threesome to
undertake a major campaign to adapt existing works for
their unique instrumentation, and, more importantly, to
be begin commissioning new works. To their great delight,
composers with widely varying styles responded to their
mission, and, to date, over 50 works have been written
specifically for the ensemble, including Kaminsky's And
Trouble Came: An African AIDS Diary. Since 1993, Fidelio
has been presented under the auspices of Musicians'
Accord as part of MA's regular New York season.
The purpose of this
recording is to bring these musical works to larger
audiences and to heighten awareness of and sensitivity to
the various issues surrounding the AIDS pandemic. This
recording is not a fundraiser but is itself the result of
extensive fundraising. Royalties will go to the composers
and the remaining proceeds support the work of the
non-profit label CRI.
However, Musicians'
Accord and CRI encourage you to get involved in the fight
against AIDS and are pleased to provide the following
list of AIDS charities and support organizations.
The AIDS crisis is
not over! Get in touch! Get involved!
Classical Action,
Performing Arts Against AIDS, 165 West 46th Street, Suite
1309, New York, NY 10036, phone (212) 997-7717
Fundraising organization that mobilizes the talent of the
classical music world.)
LIFEbeat, the Music
Industry Fights AIDS, 810 7th Avenue, 4th Floor, New
York, NY 1001, phone (212) 245-3240 (National fundraising
organization).
Estate Project for
Artists with AIDS, 330 West 42nd Street, Suite 1701, New
York, NY 10036, phone (212) 947-6340 (Encourages artists
of all disciplines with HIV/AIDS to continue their
creative output as long as possible and to make the
necessary legal provision that will protect their art for
future generations. Programs in New York, Los Angeles,
and Miami.)
Gay Men's Health Crisis
(GMHC), 1299 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011, phone
(212) 807-6655 (Provides services and advocacy for people
with AIDS and educational programs to prevent infection.)
AIDS Project Los
Angeles, 1313 North Vine, Los Angeles, CA 90028 phone
(213)993-1600 (Provides support, legal advice, case
management and advocacy for people with HIV and AIDS.)
Holy Family Hospital c/o
Sisters Margaret Moran and Marie Ego, P.O. Box 21,
Berekum B/A,Ghana, West Africa (With minimal resources
and total dedication, the Sisters at Holy Family Hospital
serve individuals afflicted with AIDS and their families,
providing health care, education and counseling.)
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