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EVAN CHAMBERS
I grew up on the edge of the suburbs. Living at a balance point between urban and rural, I did not fully belong in either world but always moved in both: symphony concerts, shopping malls, and trips to museums on one hand, and fields, ponds, and endless walks in the woods on the other. I also occupied the dividing line between folk and classical music, surrounded as I was by my father's equally enthusiastic renditions of Tchaikovsky on the violin and John Henry on the five-string banjo.
I came to love the beauty of in-between spaces. The Midwest as a region is liminal in its own way, and living here, one becomes adept at translating oneself, adapting to shifting inflections of place. As a result, this music is all in some sense between worlds too. I approached each work recorded here as a different shade of translation from my encounters with traditional musics of Ireland, Albania, and the United States into the language of concert music, striving to capture the intensity of an original experience while also creating a poem that is true to (and in) the new language as well.
I've heard that the seashore, where the realms of earth and ocean overlap, is an important locus of evolution, and that we most likely developed legs not to climb out onto the land, but in order to find a way back to the water. It is my hope that music can do something similar - that it can serve as a means to get us back to the natural world, to ourselves, and to each other.
The beauty of borders lies not merely in that they are there to be crossed, but also in how we live with and within them, and in the realization that what an edge describes is not what is marginal, but rather what is central: the point at which things connect.
COLD WATER, DRY STONE
Cold Water, Dry Stone was inspired by a trip to Albania; the first movement, The Cold Water of Himara, is based on the semi-improvisational form called kaba; sometimes described as "music with tears." The title refers to the famous streams of cold, clear water that begin in high mountain peaks and traverse an otherwise dry, dusty landscape. I imagined icy water flowing out over the parched and aching land, providing comfort and relief from the great sadnesses of the place, finally crashing over rocks into the sea.
The Road to Gjirokaster is an evocation of an eventful journey which included narrow mountain switchbacks, a flat tire, plunging gorges, and thunderclouds. The trip ended at an Ottoman fortress towering over the city of Gjirokaster, which was the site of yearly folk festivals during communist rule. Standing on the overgrown stage, I could almost sense the ghostly residual presence of musicians and costumed dancers from the past flashing all around. Yet the place also had a grim bleakness seeping up from among the weeds: the sinister shade of a cruel dictator seemed to be dancing there too.
The Dry Stones of Dukat is named for the home village of Mustafa Hoxha, and is dedicated to the memory of his son Petrit, whose whole family exuded transcendent generosity and kindness. The Hoxhas sang amazing polyphonic songs that made the walls shake and the room ring - made the air all around and between us palpable, charged, and brilliant. The power and intensity of their singing, the fierce pride and the sheer inexorable weight of the sound was overwhelming. This is a hymn to the experience of those songs, which seem almost like storage vessels for power and strength, holding a sustaining and triumphant defiance that launches itself from the distant past well out into the future. The piece was commissioned by Quorum.
THREE TANNAHILL SONGS
Robert Tannahill (1 774-1810) was a poet and songwriter in Paisley, Scotland; some of his songs are still in the folk repertoire today. He achieved some measure of fame during his lifetime, but was known throughout his life as a gentle and retiring man.
The Poor Bowlman's Remonstrance is dedicated to Sukha Linda Murray (now Haju Sunim) on the occasion of her installation as dharma heir to the Venerable Samu Sunim. She is the priest of the Ann Arbor Zen Temple, and it struck me, in light of the empathy and compassion that the poem expresses, that it was as close to a Buddhist sentiment as one was likely to get from an eighteenth-century Scottish folk poet.
Fill, Fill the Merry Bowl is dedicated to a mentor from my youth: Patrick McCabe, who taught me to play the viola, and inspired me with his infectious wild love of music. The song extols the joys of life suspended in the glow of drunken companionship.
I've always loved the still, grey in-between time after winter has departed and spring is still held in abeyance; Now Winter Wi' His Cloudy Brow takes place in this stark period of waiting when relief is palpable, and the opening verdure of spring seems at once distant and immanent. The song is dedicated to Nicholas Thorne, who taught me to trust in unabashed lyricism; the whole set was written for Jennifer Goltz.
CROSSROADS SONGS
In the past my various musical influences have always remained separate - one per work - and I approached each tradition I'd encountered as a translator might. This piece, though, has multiple ethnic and regional flavors, all mixed together. I had an image of my own listening history as a crossroads town, where people from all over meet and their cultures mingle. Albanian instrumental music, renaissance monody, Irish music, the occasional Oriental detail, and hymnody all get combined and juxtaposed, blurred together.
In Nightwaking/Distant Past, I was thinking of those moments in which one wakes in a panic, reliving some desperate moment in a dream, only to have fear and urgency gradually fade back into sleep, or perhaps into the quiet sadness that remains in the separation that time creates between our current selves and our individual and collective pasts. Simple Song/Hymn is just that, a simple song (actually an Albanian dance-trope on an Irish-style lullaby that I wrote for my daughter) followed by an even simpler hymn, which to me is less about religious symbolism than it is a return to essentials - an outgrowth of my own realization of the joy and deep gratitude to be found in the basics of life since the birth of my child. The piece was written for Paul Bro, Jimmy Finnie, and Martha Krasnican.
THE FIRE HOSE REEL
On a trip to Belfast, my wife and I kept noticing the emergency boxes labeled in large block letters: FIRE HOSE REEL. We joked that they could designate either fireboxes or a traditional Irish tune with that name. Reels are, after all, the most pyrotechnic of traditional Irish tune types, and the images of urgency and fire suggested by the name well suit the feel of traditional dance music when it takes off.
I wanted to capture the drive of a traditional session at its peak: the reels blazing along, the tunes stretched taut like one long wire until the whole thing seems ready to snap or explode. The piece is a brief but intense moto perpetuo which never quite coalesces on an actual tune, but takes a small amount of material and heats it up to the point of spontaneous combustion.
COME DOWN HEAVY!
Ev'ry mornin' at six o'clock-there were twenty tarriers a-workin' on the rock/and the boss comes 'round and he says "Keep still-and COME DOWN HEAVY ON THE CAST IRON DRILL..."
The title Come Down Heavy is taken from a line in the song "Drill Ye Tarriers." I grew up listening to my parents singing folksongs; this piece was inspired by memories of my father beating on his guitar, belting it out, and the quiet sadness in my mother's voice as she sang me to sleep. To me, folksongs are not quaint, naive or innocent, as they've often come to be misrepresented - they are powerful, sometimes gritty, bitter and ironic, full of the sadness and longing of life. Although these songs are from my past, they are also very present - my goal was to avoid casting them in a cloud of nostalgic mist or nationalistic fervor, and to capture some of the raw, rough energy and genuine ache of the music. The first movement, Steel Drivin' Man, is based on the song John Henry about the mighty railroad man and the legendary contest pitting his mythical human strength against that of the steam-drill. The style is based upon my father's full-tilt performances of the song and is dedicated to him. I Gave My Love A Cherry is dedicated to my mother; it is one of her favorite lullabies. I've treated it as a mountain lament that uses an unusual violin tuning taken from Scottish fiddle playing.
Oh Lovely Appearance of Death was written by Rev. George Whitefield in 1760. It's a song that my Grandmother used to sing, and I learned it from my father. Although the words are quite morbid, I've always been haunted by the melody. Drill Ye Tarriers is rooted firmly in the Anglo-Irish tradition, and appears here first as a modified Irish reel, and later as a jig layered with the song "Patsy on the Railroad." It is also finally transformed into a wild tarantella, a direct influence of my wife's Italian-American family! The work was written for James Umble and the Cleveland Duo.
COMPOSER
Evan Chambers studied composition at the University of Michigan, where he joined the faculty in 1993. He is also a traditional Irish fiddler, and appears frequently as a performer of his
own works. Awards for his music include first prize in the Cincinnati Symphony Composers' Competition and the Walter Beeler Prize from Ithaca College, as well as recognition from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Luigi Russolo Competition, the Vienna Modern
Masters Competition, NACUSA, and the American Composers Forum. His works have been performed by the Cincinnati, Kansas City, Memphis, and Albany Symphonies. He has been a resident of the MacDowell Colony, and awarded grants from Meet the Composer and the Arts
Foundation of Michigan. He studied composition with William Albright, Leslie Bassett, Nicholas Thorne, and Marilyn Shrude, and electronic music with George Wilson and Burton Beerman. His works have been released on recordings by the Foundation Russolo-Pratella, Cambria, Centuar, and Albany Records, and have been recorded by the Greene String Quartet, the Albany Symphony, and Quorum, with whom he serves as resident composer.
A NOTE ON THE RECORDING:
All recordings exist on the border between live performance and electronic realization. As a composer whose work includes both acoustic and electronic music, I've made use of the sensibilities and techniques acquired through years in the electronic studio to craft the sound space of each instrument and each piece on this compact disk. The tradition in classical music has been to record the sound of a hall in order to simulate a concert experience; in this project, however, we strove to achieve a heightened presence for the instruments while maintaining a natural sounding representation of the music. -EKC
QUORUM
Quorum is a sextet noted for their intensely committed performances of contemporary music and works from the last half of the 20th century. Formed in 1994, the group actively commissions new works, and has recently completed tours of the Southwestern and Eastern US, including a recital at New York's Merkin Hall.
Kimberly Cole (clarinet) is Associate Professor at Eastern Michigan University, where she performs with the Eastern Winds and is a member of the Michigan Opera Theater Orchestra. She is a frequent recitalist, and has appeared at the Brazilian Clarinet Symposium, the International Computer Music Conference, International Double Reed Convention, and International Clarinet Association Conferences. Cole has performed with numerous orchestras including the Detroit and Toledo Symphonies.
Winston Collier (bassoon) has been principal bassoonist of the Flagstaff Symphony and is currently a member of the Laureate Quintet. He has performed with the Toledo, Flint, Ann Arbor, Lansing, and Windsor symphonies and has made recital appearances throughout the US. Collier served for six summers on the summer faculty of the Interlochen Center for the Arts, and is now on the faculty of West Virginia University.
Midori Koga (piano) has toured with the Windemere trio, and appeared at the Banff Centre, the Al Fresno Festival, Johannesen International Festival, the Wiener Saal Recital Series in Salzburg Austria, and the World Saxophone Congress. She has been awarded prizes in the Concours de Musique du Canada, National Artists Competition at St. Mary's and Notre Dame, and the University of Michigan Concerto Competition. She is currently Assistant Professor of Piano at Michigan State University.
Timothy McAllister (saxophone) has made critically acclaimed recordings on the Einstein, Equilibrium and Centaur labels. His career has included solo appearances in New York's Carnegie Hall, and Rotterdam's Wilhelm Pijper Hall and Zaal de Unie. His awards include First Prize in the North American Saxophone Alliance Competition and the Pulaski-Rauch Competition, and recognition from the Gaudeamus International Interpreter's Competition. He is currently on the faculty of The Crane School of Music at SUNY-Potsdam.
Alison Shaw (percussion) tours with Balance, which commissions new works for percussion/tuba duo. In addition to an active orchestral career, she has performed with the Myriad Ensemble and the Detroit Contemporary Chamber Players, and was recently featured at the Percussive Arts Society. She solos with the New Columbian Band and is principal timpanist with the Brass Band of Battle Creek. She teaches at Michigan State University.
Carolyn Stuart (violin) performs with the Stuart-Ivanov Duo, and serves on the faculty of the University of South Florida and the Interlochen Center for the Arts summer program. She has performed for Long Island Composers' Alliance, New Mexico Composers' Conference, and with the new music ensemble, EKKO! She has also appeared as soloist and concertmaster with orchestras throughout the US. Stuart holds degrees from University of Michigan and The Juilliard School.
Jennifer Goltz (soprano) received an MM in Vocal Performance from the University of Michigan. She was invited by composer Luciano Beno to revive his Circles at the Salzburg Music Festival in 1999, and has developed a reputation as an outstanding interpreter of contemporary music in her frequent performances and premieres with the new music ensemble Brave New Works in Ann Arbor Ml.
Also available on Albany records: Evan Chambers' Concerto for Fiddle and Violin on Brutal Reality (Tray 354):
Nollaig Casey, Jill Levy, and the Albany Symphony conducted by David Alan Miller.
Evan Chambers, Producer; Daniel Worley, Co-Producer.
Recorded at Solid Sound Studios in Ann Arbor Michigan. Engineered by Will Spencer and Chris Goosman.
Edited and mastered by Daniel Worley and Evan Chambers at Miscellaneous Studios.
Design by Marty Somberg, Somberg Design, Ann Arbor MI.
This project was funded in part by grants from the University of Michigan.
The Dry Stones of Dukat was composed in residence at, and with the support of the MacDowell Colony.
Cover photo and page 4 photo from Long Life to Your Children copyright 1997 by Stan Sherer and Marjorie Senechal. Published by the University of Massachusetts Press. Used by permission.
Endless gratitude to Midori, Carolyn, Tim, Dan, Jennifer, Alison, Winston and Kim. A deep bow to our families for all of their invaluable help with the project: Jun Nogami, Marty Erickson, Suzanne Camino and Elena Hope, O'Bryan and Taylor Worley, Svetozar Ivanov and Charles Luevano. Thanks as well to Rob Martens, Gloria Price, Valerie Reed and Eric Walton. Thanks to Will for his intention and attention and to Chris for the disco ball.
May all beings be at peace.
(c)2000 EVAN CHAMBERS
ALBANY RECORDS U.S.
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ALBANY RECORDS U.K.
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