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Sea Drift
Wind Music of Anthony Iannaccone
Clarion Wind Symphony ·Max Plank, Conductor
NOTES
by Robert Stein
Anthony Iannaccone (born New York City, 1943) studied at the Manhattan School of Music and the Eastman School of Music. His principal teachers were Vittorio Giannini, Aaron Copland, and David Diamond. During the 1960's, he supported himself as a part-time teacher (Manhattan School) and orchestral violinist. His catalogue of approximately 50 published works includes three symphonies, as well as smaller works for orchestra, several large works for chorus and orchestra, numerous chamber pieces, and a variety of works for wind ensemble. His music is performed by major orchestras and professional chamber ensembles in the U.S. and abroad. Since 1971, he has taught at Eastern Michigan University, where he conducts the Collegium Musicum.
Some sense of the character and range of Iannaccone's music can be gleaned from a sampling of various descriptions given by authors and critics over the past three decades: "...dark but never despairing ... intense lyricism with a distinct personality..." [Stereo Review]; "...verdant , and always beautifully orchestrated ..." [New York Times]; "... the music's sonic diversity and ensembling of colors are masterful ... [the reviewer] never failing to be enthralled by the insights of its argument and development ..." [Fanfare].
These comments reflect Iannaccone's balanced concern with the abstract relationship of form and content and the concrete features of color, texture, and rhythm. The wind music on this disc vividly illustrates Iannaccone's individual handling of these technical and aesthetic concerns. From the taut and dissonant Antiphonies (1972) to the engaging and brightly-painted Terpsichore (1980), from the warm, transparent chamber music at the beginning of Sea Drift (1992) to the massive and thrusting waves of sound at its end, the listener can feel the personal hand of the composer shaping and pacing the large and small dimensions of the music. The seemingly effortless blend of chromaticism and diatonicism and the seamless growth of simple melodic-harmonic cells into complex lattices of competing colors and rhythms evolve into forms of continuity and contrast that are at once distinctive and coherent.
With the exception of Toccata Fanfares and Antiphonies , all of the works on this disc are strongly programmatic. The poetry of Walt Whitman has afforded Iannaccone his most potent literary stimulus. His three symphonies, Whispers of Heavenly Death, several of his extended choral works and songs, and two of the works on this recording owe their genesis to specific Whitman poems.
Both Sea Drift (1992) and Apparitions (1986) were commissioned by Western Michigan University and the Sinfonia Foundation and were premiered in Kalamazoo by the Western Michigan University Wind Ensemble with the composer conducting. Sea Drift was awarded first prize in the 38th Biennial Ostwald Composition Competition in 1995.
Like most works of Iannaccone, the eclectic language of Sea Drift and Apparitions encompasses diatonic, chromatic, and twelve-tone elements. It embraces the familiar idioms of Debussy, Bartok, and Stravinsky, and, to a lesser extent, the influence of Berg, Mahler, Barber, and Copland. Although Sea Drift and Apparitions do not sound like Debussy, Debussy's emphasis on modified repetition and cumulative growth finds a counterpart here in many delicately colored passages where harmonic stasis and pitches favoring the so-called acoustic scale create sensuous or shimmering sound-terrains which contrast to more developmental or dynamic passages.
The composer has written the following notes in the scores of Sea Drift and Apparitions:
The three movements of Sea Drift derive their titles and inspiration from three poems in the Walt Whitman collection entitled Sea-Drift.
Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking is a poem that blends extended metaphor with a variety of techniques to deal with a three-component core: birth, life (=love), and death (=rebirth). The poem is in the form of a childhood reminiscence, told by the poet about an experience involving a mockingbird that loses his mate, about the sea, and about the poet's self-discovery of his poetic voice.
Much of this poem and the first movement of Sea Drift implies an undulating, rocking quality with music that rises and falls or swells and ebbs. Peaks of happiness plunge to troughs of despair, all against the background of the endlessly rocking cradle of life and deaththe sea. The music of the first movement is filled with both the longing and the wave-like qualities suggested by Whitman's poem. The sad song of the mockingbird is fused with the song of the poet and the whispers of the sea to form a unity and a reconciliation out of diversity and conflict. The poetic trio of bird-boy-sea is symbolized in the music by the timbres of flute-clarinet (or oboe)-horn. The complete cycle of birth-life-death is suggested by an overall trajectory of cumulative and disintegrating textures, unfolding in music which is, by turn, lyrical/static, then angular/dynamic/conflicting, and finally, song-like and static again.
The second movement, On the Beach at Night, evokes a reflective scene in which a father and child are contemplating a sky of shimmering stars, some of which appear to be devoured by ravenous dark cloud masses. Out of this symbolic celestial conflict, several stars, some delicate, some radiant, emerge victoriously, intimating the poet's mystical intuition of the immortality of cosmic spirit. The music, marked sognando (dreaming), is built on an interplay of resonant, ringing sonorities. These sonorities range from delicate and gentle treble sounds to lustrous and richer full ensemble chords with sharp attacks and overlapping decays. The top notes of these chords outline song-like material heard earlier in the first movement.
The third movement, Song for All Seas, is marked "Like wind over waves." This music, like that of movements one and two, is largely derived from the pitch materials first heard in the clarinet solo at the beginning of movement one. Here, however, these pitches are transformed into rhythmic and textural shapes that suggest the mercurial energy of the sea. Tranquil waves are quickly altered into aggressive surges of water and energy. The movement ends in climactic swells of colliding rhythmic figures which culminate in a final burst on B flat.
The concept of Apparitions was inspired by Whitman's brief poem of the same name. The composition deals with both the appearances (or "apparitions") and true nature of an idea, whether it be a poetic image or a musical phrase. The idea exists or lives only in the human imagination which animates and connects the melody, texture, or image with its own experience of the real world. By transforming the character of the musical or poetic setting or context, a composer or a poet can make both "strange and clear" (to quote Whitman) a remarkable variety of "apparitions" all derived from the same musical shape or poetic idea.
The three basic musical shapes which "appear" in Apparitions all share the pitch pattern of a falling fifth and a rising sixth. They are, in order of appearance: first, a sweeping wave of accumulating notes - a cold wind on a dark night - borrowed from my first symphony (1965); second, a
musical quote from Schubert's song, the Erlking, in which a child pleads with his father to see an "apparition" which the father cannot see but which is terrifyingly real to the little boy; and third, a quote from a Luther/Bach chorale tune that outlines the falling fifth and rising sixth of the child's melody in Schubert's song. The ubiquitous sextuplet which appears in many forms throughout Apparitions is borrowed from the triplet accompaniment of the Schubert song.
In 1984, the American Guild of Organists commissioned Iannaccone to compose eight fanfares for the Detroit Symphony Brass, which performed them at a national AGO conference in the following year. Following the premiere, these works were published as Toccata Fanfares, in two volumes of four fanfares each. Akin to what Hindemith might have called gebrauchsmusik, the fanfares were scored with a flexible instrumentation. They can be performed by a sextet of three trumpets and three trombones or by a large brass choir. The sextet version was chosen for this recording. The fanfares are light, playful pieces, highly accessible to listeners and popular with performers.
After a Gentle Rain (1979) was written for and premiered by Max Plank and the Eastern Michigan University Symphonic Band. It is Iannaccone's most popular band work and has received more than a thousand performances world-wide. The work is based on a six-note figure from the composer's Suite for Orchestra (1962). According to Iannaccone, "the unaffected simplicity and directness and the rhythmic elegance of Debussy's Les collines d'Anacapri (Preludes, Book I) furnished a subconscious influence for this piece."
The first movement of After a Gentle Rain, The Dark Green Glistens with Old Reflections, suggests images of light reflecting off moist green foliage as a metaphor for "reflections" (thoughts) on old memories. Much of the harmony is motionless, but the listener can discern timbral and textural progression as melodic-harmonic figures emerge and vanish in contrasting registers, spacings, and configurations. The "old reflections" become bolder, culminate in a powerful climax, and recede into the past with the same afterglow of gentle bell sounds that defined the movement's beginning.
The second movement of After a Gentle Rain summons the bright and guileless optimism of the Debussy prelude cited earlier with music that dances exuberantly.
Antiphonies (1972) is Iannaccone's least performed work for winds and percussion. It was written for and premiered by Thomas Tyra, Plank's predecessor at Eastern Michigan University. Antiphonies is a darker work than the other pieces on this disc. It deals more with sound than theme as the primary musical issue. Sharply defined solo colors and rhythmic gestures appear and are subsequently recast in conflict or merger with other gestures and sonorities derived from them. A pair of solo flutes reappears several times with an uneasy hovering atmosphere that seems poised to explode. The music does ultimately erupt with considerable violent energy, which dissolves into several aleatoric streams of softly layered colors. An uneasy foreboding again infiltrates the music, which simmers momentarily and releases a final discharge in three forceful chords.
Both Images of Song and Dance were commissioned by ensembles in upstate New York: Orpheus (No. 1) for the Cornell University Wind Ensemble and Terpsichore (No. 2) for the Crane Wind Ensemble.
Named after the ancient Greek muse or goddess of dance, Terpsichore (1980) is a lighthearted essay in foot-rhythms. The two principal ideas that propagate this extroverted romp are a lofty, sustained, and rising half-note triplet and a heavy-footed, syncopated quarter-note figure. The arched triplet and its accented quarter-note complement are transformed into a simpler diatonic tune in three-four time. The latter passage, in the words of the composer, "...suggests the directness and vitality of folk dance in the foreground tune while concealing a barely detectable estampie melody in the background." Competing melodic fragments now return as clashing dance "images" in a Bacchanalian orgy that ends Terpsichore in a brilliant flourish.
MAX PLANK AND THE CLARION WIND SYMPHONY
Before beginning his formal education, Max Plank studied piano with James Schaible and Margaret Johnson. However, his principal performing interests turned to saxophone and conducting. He became known as a saxophone virtuoso and studied with Marlin Billings, Larry Teal, and Jean-Marie Londeix, and performed throughout the Midwest as a soloist and recording artist. He received undergraduate and graduate degrees from Emporia State University in Kansas where he studied theory and composition with Charles M. Hendricks and conducting with Leopold Liegl. His advanced degree in saxophone performance, the second such degree granted in the United States, is from the University of Michigan.
From the time his interest in the music of our century was awakened by C.M. Hendricks, Plank has championed twentieth-century music and has conducted new works in every season. He has had a hand in commissioning and performing new works by Joseph Schwantner, Michael Colgrass, Anthony Iannaccone, David Gillingham, Michael Ruszczynski, and others. He has served for twenty years as co-chair of a biennial festival of new music in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
Plank formed the Clarion Wind Symphony in 1997 in response to a perceived need for a wind group which will perform the highest quality wind repertoire of our time to a standard that matches any. The Clarion Wind Symphony's plans for concertizing and touring will help to promulgate the outstanding works for winds being written by today's composers. He has served with distinction as a professor at Eastern Michigan University for over thirty years.
CLARION WIND SYMPHONY
Max Plank, conductor
Piccolo Bass Clarinet Trombone
Karen Matthews John Ginther Michael Hall, principal
Flute Contra Clarinet Greg Lanzi
Julie Stone, principal J.R. Hay David Woike
Rodney Hill Saxophone Euphonium
Asta Sepetys Tim Miller, principal Michael Fisher, principal
Rebecca VegaAaron Larson Michael Schott
Oboe Matthew Mankoff Tuba
Kristy Meretta, principal Lawrence Van Oyen Gary Supplee
Amy Blankenship Piano Percussion
Bassoon Li Jia J. Whitney Prince, principal
David Pierce, principal Zhihua Tang Ethan Allen
Christine M. Prince Trumpet Matthew Kazmierski
Clarinet Woodrow English, principal Michael Noble
Kimberly Cole, principal Carter Eggers Harp
Deborah Andrus Deborah Lokey Ruth Myers
Lisa Dills Max Morden Celesta
Joseph Masserant Maurice Mueller Zhihua Tang
Hild Peersen Horn Li Jia
Josette Rechul Willard Zirk, principal Librarian
Seth Semons Randall Faust Victoria Lucas
Wendy Webster-Fischer Bernhard Kirchner Special Projects
Penelope Westerdale Kristen TenWolde Valerie Kabat
Marilyn Wiltse, assistant
Equipment
Matthew Mankoff
Producers: Marice Stith, Robert Stein
Cover Art: Joseph Mallord William Turner, Breakers on a Flat Beach, ca. 1830-5. Oil on canvas, 902 x 1210 cm. Tate Gallery, London, Great Britain. Permission courtesy of Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.
Recording and Technical Direction: Marice Stith
Digital Editing: Mark Bunce
Photos: Richard Schwarze
Performers in Toccata Fanfares: Woodrow English, Max Morden, Carter Eggers (trumpets), Michael Hall, David Woike, Greg Lanzi (trombones)
Publishers (ASCAP): Ludwig Music Co. (Sea Drift and Apparitions), Theodore Presser (Toccata Fanfares), Shawnee Press (After a Gentle Rain), Seesaw Music Corp. (Antiphonies), Kjos Music (Terpsichore).
This recording was made possible in part by grants from the NOVA Fund, the Michigan Council for the Arts, and the American Music Center. All works were recorded in the presence of the composer.
SEA DRIFT
Wind Music of Anthony Iannaccone
Clarion Wind Symphony ·Max Plank, Conductor
Sea Drift (1992)
Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking (9:21)
On the Beach at Night (5:05)
Song for All Seas (3:41)
Apparitions (1986) (13:03)
Toccata Fanfares (1984)
Volume I, No. 1 (1:40)
Volume I, No. 3 (1:28)
Volume II, No. 4 (1:24)
After A Gentle Rain (1979)
The Dark Green Glistens with Old Reflections (4:04)
Sparkling Air Bursts with Dancing Sunlight (3:08)
Antiphonies (1972) (10:40)
Images of Song and Dance, No. 2: Terpsichore (1980) (7:53)
Total Time = 61:54
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