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Cleveland Chamber Symphony
Cleveland Chamber Symphony
Edwin London, Music Director
The New American Scene III
Donald Erb, a widely-performed and recorded composer and a sought-after teacher, recently retired as head of the composition faculty at the Cleveland Institute of Music. He was born in Youngstown, Ohio in 1927 and has taught composition for over 30 years at such schools as Southern Methodist University, Indiana University and Melbourne University. He has also been in demand as a lecturer and composer-in-residence at various institutions. He has given master classes at over 100 colleges, universities and conservatories. He wrote a major article on orchestration for the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Erb's orchestral music has been played by every major American symphony orchestra and by many in Europe and elsewhere. He has fulfilled major commissions from the orchestras of Cleveland, Chicago, Saint Louis, Baltimore, Dallas, Houston and others. He has written a series of ten instrumental concertos which have been premiered by such artists as cellist Lynn Harrell, clarinetist Richard Stoltzman and trombonist Stuart Dempster. One of his works, The Seventh Trumpet, has had over 200 performances by over 50 different orchestras.
He took an early interest in electronic music, producing a widely-performed piece for live synthesizer and conventional instruments, Reconnaissance, in 1965. His chamber music has been heard in festivals at Darmstadt, Warsaw, Tanglewood and elsewhere. At one time Erb earned his living as a jazz trumpeter, and jazz has influenced his compositional language in a number of significant works. His music also reflects his interest in pushing the possibilities of conventional instruments beyond their usual ranges, in using unconventional sound-sources as part of the orchestra, and in the judicious use of aleatoric (chance) techniques.
Solstice For Chamber Orchestra
Solstice is celebratory in nature. It was commissioned by the Ohio Chamber Orchestra with the support of the Ohio Arts Council and was premiered by the OCO under conductor Dwight Oltman on June 3, 1988. Oltman and the OCO performed it twice on that program.
Solstice was originally intended to celebrate the Ohio Chamber Orchestra's fifteenth anniversary, but the premiere occurred one season later. It remains, however, in the composer's words "a work of celebration, and, therefore, not intended to convey feelings of cosmic gloom."
At the time of the world premiere the Cleveland Plain Dealer's reviewer found the piece "aggressive rather than celebratory" and commented on its "imaginative and sharply contrasted bursts of orchestral sound," with "great roaring sheets of percussion" succeeded quickly by "delicate running figurations or tiny little duets between individual instruments." A three-note figure outlining the interval of a semitone is extensively varied. The brief piece (about nine minutes long) also features microtonal effects, glissandi, dissonant cluster-chords and sudden dramatic silences.
The summer solstice occurs on or about June 21, marking the time when the sun is furthest from the equator in the northern hemisphere. It is a signal that summer has finally and officially arrived. The word "solstice" literally means "the sun stands still" and the date has been marked by rituals and religious observances in many cultures. According to one widely respected theory the famous Stonehenge monument in present-day England was intended to predict the arrival of the summer solstice to a prehistoric people who had no calendars in the modern sense.
George Perle, winner in 1986 of both the Pulitzer Prize for his Fourth Wind Quintet and a MacArthur Fellowship, was born in 1915 in Bayonne, New Jersey, grew up in the Midwest, and received his early musical education in Chicago. After service in World War II he moved to New York, where he earned his Ph.D. degree at New York University. He is Professor Emeritus of the City University of New York and has also held teaching positions and guest professorships at other major universities throughout the U.S.A. In 1989, he was Visiting Ernest Bloch Professor of Music at the University of California, and his ensuing lectures resulted in his most recent book, The Listening Composer. Among his other books are The Operas of Alban Berg and Serial Composition and Atonality, now in its sixth edition and recently published in a Chinese translation.
Active as guest composer and lecturer here and abroad, Mr. Perle has been three-time composer-in-residence at the Tanglewood Music Center, where his music has been frequently performed. Perle's compositions are recorded on Nonesuch, CRI, New World Records, and other labels. The Nonesuch recording of Serenade No. 3 was nominated for a Grammy award in 1986 and choreographed for American Ballet Theater under the title, Enough Said. Mr. Perle's most recent orchestral compositions include two piano concertos (respectively commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony and the Koussevitsky Foundation), Sinfonietta I (commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony), and Dance Fantasy (commissioned by the Houston Symphony Orchestra). Mr. Perle is a member of both the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the National Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The Lyric Intermezzo was composed on a commission from the Seattle Symphony and completed April 12, 1987, but its very first conception goes back some years before that, when my friend (now my wife), Shirley Rhoads, played Schumann's Waldszenen for me. I decided that I too would like to write a set of lyrical Charakterstucke for the piano. I composed a single short piece in the spring of 1981, but put it aside pending the completion of other projects. Later that same year Ralph Shapey invited me to write a short piece for chamber orchestra in honor of Paul Fromm's 75th birthday. I expanded my little piano piece into a 75-bar Anniversary Rondo for Paul, which now, newly title Rondoletto, forms the center-piece of the new work.
The collective title of the suite pays homage to Schumann through Heine, whose Lyrisches Intermezzo was the source of the texts of Dichterliebe. The theme of the Fantasy Variations is a little piano piece (17 measures) that I composed in 1940, my earliest published composition and the very first in the musical language that I now call "twelve-tone tonality." The Postlude, with the addition of a coda, recapitulates the opening Andante. The work is scored for flute, English horn, clarinet in A, bassoon, French horn, trumpet in B flat, trombone, tuba, percussion (Celeste, tambourine, and glockenspiel), harp, two violins, viola, cello, and bass.
William Duckworth was born in Morganton, NC in 1943 and educated at East Carolina University and the University of Illinois, where he studied with Ben Johnston. He has written over one hundred works, the best known of which is his Time Curve Preludes for piano, an hour-long work which has been performed on five continents, recorded by Lovely Music and published by C. F. Peters. The Village Voice described this work as the first "postminimal music."
In Europe, Duckworth has been a member of the composition forum at Darmstadt and a guest composer at Ferrara, Italy. In New York his evening-long choral work Southern Harmony was premiered at Merkin Hall in 1992 by the Gregg Smith Singers; in 1994 a recording of that work was #4 among National Public Radio's Top 10 New Sounds for the year. In 1993 came New York premieres of Duckworth's Their Song and Gathering Together/Revolution, a work for mallet percussion, drums and keyboards. As a performer, Duckworth participated in the famous memorial concert held in 1992 in honor of the recently-deceased John Cage. He was also the final pianist in another famous event, the 18-hour long complete performance of Eric Satie's piano piece Vexations at the downtown New York club, Roulette, in 1993 to honor the 100th anniversary of that work, which consists of 18 bars of music followed by the instruction that they are to be repeated 840 times.
Duckworth received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to compose Simple Songs about Sex and War with the poet Hayden Carruth,
and two additional fellowships to interview American experimental composers. From these conversations emerged his first book, Talking Music, published in 1995. He is currently completing a book about La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela and a new musical work, Cathedral, for voices, strings, organ, percussion and electronic sounds which will use the cathedral environment itself as a musical instrument in which voices, both real and imagined, will "continually reconfigure themselves in three-dimensional space."
This piece stems from an experiment that essentially involved collaboration of a composer with an ensemble to create a new work while an audience witnessed the process during a series of workshops.
It happened in Florida in 1995-96, the composer says, as part of a series of residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts by the New Performance Group of Seattle. Duckworth does not ordinarily compose with an audience present, but in this case, he says, the performers and he "quickly found common ground as the piece took on a life of its own." He had done some advance preparation by preparing a series of "templates:" 38 scales; 58 "primary harmonies," some of which came from Erik Satie; and 15 "secondary harmonies." He had also gathered some rhythms he planned to use, some of them derived from popular music. His plan, he says, was "to make the piece sound kaleidoscopic, with hidden references both to the past and the present."
By the second of his three week-long visits to Florida, the composer says he knew his piece would also exist as a work for orchestra as well as for a chamber ensemble; by the end of his third visit he could imagine an electronic version as well. "For me," he says, "Mysterious Numbers is one of those pieces that developed from the tension and energy of the situation. In some ways, the work done in Florida is the source material from which the other versions flow. Because we worked so fast and in such short, concentrated periods of time, none of us are still quite sure where this music came from. The title comes both from that experience as well as from the many templates I used in composing it."
Salvatore Martirano, (born in 1927), currently Professor of Music at the University of Illinois at Urbana, studied composition with Herbert Elwell, Bernard Rogers, and Luigi Dallapiccola. His compositions have been performed extensively throughout the United States, Europe, Japan, and Australia. His music is published by Schott, London, G. Schirmer, N.Y., and Smith Publications, Baltimore. He has recorded for CRI, Advance, Heliodor, Polydor, New World Records, and Centaur.
Isabela for orchestra was originally aimed at music festivals celebrating the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America. However, music festivals celebrating Columbus ran aground as the implications for native Americans became apparent. Whether from habit or from a persistent motive, what started as a "working title" became a name as I considered that like Columbus, who began a journey across the sea without really knowing where his course would lead him, I began to compose without really knowing what would result from my plan. Plan? More a set of composing tools: an ordered list of chords from closed to open position - waves; an inversion - submersion (going down); unbalanced orchestration (overdoubling a note, an unmatched match between thumb and pinkie) - . . . etc. and so on.
First Cause: Isabela, a pseudonym, exemplifies the perfect patroness. "Behind every great man, . . ." Strike that as politically incorrect! I couldn't very well call the piece "The Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois" for orchestra.
Standalone: Isabela is the first part of four to be followed by workinprogress Columbo for signal processed baritone and orchestra, and now workinprogress L'oro and Gli'Indiani.
In the last thirteen lines of the Paradiso, Dante resolved the conflict between the rational impossibility of measuring the area of a circle concluding that it must be love that moved "the planets and the other stars."
Isabela was premiered by the Radio/Television Orchestra of Romania, under the direction of guest conductor Edwin London, during the Third Annual Contemporary Music Festival in Bucharest, Romania, in May, 1993.
Edwin London, music director of the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, has served living music throughout his distinguished career. He has formed two highly acclaimed ensembles: Ineluctable Modality, a new music choral ensemble, in 1968, and the award-winning Cleveland Chamber Symphony in 1980. He has earned the Letter of Distinction from the American Music Center, the ASCAP-John S. Edwards Award and the Laurel Leaf Award from the American Composers Alliance.
Born in Philadelphia in 1929, London began his career as a horn player in both symphony orchestras and the Oscar Pettiford Jazz Band. After graduation from the Oberlin Conservatory, he received a doctorate from the University of Iowa. Subsequent teachers have included Luigi Dallapiccola, Darius Milhaud and Gunther Schuller. He taught at Smith College, the University of Illinois and the University of California at San Diego before becoming a professor at Cleveland State University in 1978.
Cleveland Chamber Symphony
The Cleveland Chamber Symphony is a professional ensemble-in-residence at Cleveland State University whose mission is to present new American music. Since its founding in 1980 by Edwin London, the orchestra has performed the world premieres of146 works, 85 of which were commissioned by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony. The Cleveland Chamber Symphony has received repeated national recognition for its strong commitment to new American music including the coveted John S. Edwards award three times. It has also received the American Music Center Letter of Distinction and nine ASCAP awards for adventuresome programming of contemporary music.
All the recordings were made live in concert in Drinko Recital Hall of Cleveland State University. This special archive concert recording was made possibly by the cooperation of the members of the Cleveland Chamber Symphony and the American Federation of Musicians.
Donald Erb's Solstice was recorded live in concert, October 14, 1996; George Perle's Lyric Intermezzo was recorded live in concert, August 27, 1993; William Duckworth's Mysterious Numbers was recorded live in concert, April 14, 1997; and SalvatoreMartirano's Isabela was recorded live in concert, October 18, 1993.
Fantasy Variations (4:15)
Always changing, moving ahead (6:19)
Cleveland Chamber Symphony
Edwin London, Music Director
All works recorded live in concert.
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