21ST-CENTURY MUSIC / April 2011

21ST
CENTURY
MUSIC


April 2011

Volume 18, Number 4


Rob Kapilow - The Golden Gate Project / Mark Alburger

Chronicle of February 2011

Comment - The Cantilever of Chords / Lisa Scola Prosek

Recording


Illustration / Viktor Ullman - The Emperor of Atlantis


Editorial Staff

Mark Alburger
EDITOR-PUBLISHER

Harriet March Page
ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Patti Noel Deuter
ASSISTANT EDITOR

Erling Wold
WEBMASTER

Alexis Alrich
Katherine Buono
Ken Bullock
A.J. Churchill
David Cleary
Jeff Dunn
Phillip George
Elliot Harmon
Brian Holmes
Jeff Kaliss
John Lane
Arel Lucas
Michael McDonagh
Chip Michael
Tom Moore
William Rowland
Lisa Scola Prosek
Andrew Shapiro
CORRESPONDENTS


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Rob Kapilow - The Golden Gate Project / Mark Alburger

Upon learning about the Marin Symphony's Golden Gate Opus project, a question leapt to mind: "Why not a northern California composer?", given the wealth of top composers in this area, including John Adams, Paul Dresher, Terry Riley, Erling Wold, and Pamela Z -- to name a few. But, virtually from the moment of meeting New-York-based Rob Kapilow, at San Rafael's Embassy Suites, amid a brouhaha of cameras and lights (the first part of our interview was filmed), the sense was that this energetic and youthful composer, who belies his 1952 birth date, is a fine choice to write a large-scale work soliciting community input, celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge. Almost immediately he spoke enthusiastically of Steve Reich's use of found sounds in City Life (1995).

***

KAPILOW: Real-world sounds are definitely a part of the project. The sound-effects guy from Prairie Home Companion, named Fred Newman, is a collaborator with me. Chorus is part of the project, and orchestra is part of the project, and we're still figuring out how it all fits together. Everybody knows what the Golden Gate Bridge looks like, but what does it sound like? We've been asking pretty much every group we go to -- "What are the sounds you associate with the Bridge?" And we've had some pretty amazing conversations with people. Phenomenal.

ALBURGER: And you're filming these conversations.

KAPILOW: The same film group followed around a symphony that I did for the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial. And that became a PBS documentary that aired nation-wide last year.

ALBURGER: Did you write the piece recently?

KAPILOW: 2007.

ALBURGER: Recent enough.

KAPILOW: The idea is similar in the sense of following around the piece from its first beginnings. I call these City Pieces -- pieces where I pick a topic that engages a city.

ALBURGER: Despite the fact that this is a semi-natural, semi-manmade setting. Well, obviously, the Bridge itself...

KAPILOW: One of the questions is "Who's Bridge is it?" I mean, it's not Marin's, it's not San Francisco's. But it's also the world's. The idea is to engage the community as I'm writing it, from beginning all the way through the final stages.

ALBURGER: Another question you raise is "What is the community?"

KAPILOW: That's the thing. One of the things we've discovered, is, what every you think it is, it's bigger. One of the kids' suggestions that kept coming up over and over again about sounds associated with the Bridge is all the foreign languages spoken on the Bridge. And it's very clear that it's the world's Bridge.

ALBURGER: Have you walked the Bridge?

KAPILOW: Oh, yes. And we're doing many version of the Bridge.

ALBURGER: The sounds...

KAPILOW: Yes, Claudia Nakagi is a sound archivist who's been out here. She has archival sounds of the Bridge recorded over two generations. So she is feeding us all the raw sounds -- giving them to Fred and me, and we're going to work them into this piece.

ALBURGER: Beautiful! What's the conceived duration?

KAPILOW: Somewhere between 20 and 30 minutes.

ALBURGER; Would the musique-concrete portion of this be thorough-going?

KAPILOW: We'll see.

ALBURGER: That's an open question.

KAPILOW: That's part of the fun of this project, is to go out to people in the city. One of the other goals of the project, of course, is to demystify composition, and to remove whatever barriers people might think there are, and to get people to understand that writing a piece is no different than writing anything else. So, I want people in at the very first stage when I'm asking them, "What does a piece of music about the Golden Gate Bridge sound like?" Then I will keep coming back. Also we have a Facebook site called Golden Gate Opus, and we're asking people to talk to us, offer thoughts. As I write the piece, I will put up bits of it as it gets written.

ALBURGER: Cool. Anyone whistling melodies for you?

KAPILOW: Absolutely. In fact, I met with the Youth Symphony and also the Marin School of the Arts. We had them doing some samples, and playing some ideas, doing some improvisation of fog horns and fog and wind. I wanted them to get a sense of what it's like to engage in the question of "What does a piece about the Golden Gate Bridge sound like?"

***

A Google search of Rob Kapilow reveals a similarly brilliantly engaging speaker in national television forums, but paradoxically very little composition -- so we shall just have to wait in greatest expectation for the conclusion of this project: a new work premiered on each side of the Gate, commemorating the 75th Anniversary of the Bridge in May, 2012.

Chronicle of February 2011

February 1

Boston Lyric Opera presents Viktor Ullmann's Emperor of Atlantis, or Death Quits and Richard Beaudoin After-Image. Calderwood Pavilion, Boston, MA. "Ullmann, an accomplished Czech composer who had studied with Schoenberg and worked with Zemlinsky, wrote this searing, scarcely veiled satire of Hitler with Petr Kien, an artist and poet, in 1943, when both were interned at the Terezin concentration camp, the so-called 'model camp' with a busy cultural life, set up by the Nazis to persuade representatives of the Red Cross that life in the camps was not so bad. Though it has had many performances since it was reconstructed from Ullmann’s manuscript in the mid-1970s, most have been in the context of programs or series devoted to the music of composers lost in the Holocaust, rather than as part of an opera season. . . . One reason opera houses have resisted Emperor is its brevity. At less than an hour it makes up only part of an evening, but finding the right piece to pair it with is a challenge. The Boston Lyric Opera’s solution was to commission Richard Beaudoin, a composer on the Harvard faculty, to write a short, independent work that could be used as a prologue. His After-Image, a 20-minute reflection on how photographs shape our memories of war (and those who live through them), uses texts by Rilke, Friedrich Rückert and William Henry Fox Talbot, the 19th-century British pioneer of photography. Mr. Beaudoin’s gently wistful piece, scored for the same instrumentation as Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time -- another work composed in a Nazi camp -- makes no allusions to Emperor, or to World War II specifically. Instead it traces the emotional arc of a young woman musing over a photograph of her father as a young soldier and lets us hear the father’s reminiscences, sung from the grave, of that distant time. The Daughter was largely a spoken part, but the mezzo-soprano Jamie Van Eyck sang the role’s few arias affectingly, and the bass-baritone Kevin Burdette put across the Father’s music with a sharply focused clarity and power. Mr. Burdette was also the star of Emperor, in which he played the combined role of Death and the Loudspeaker with an idiosyncratic, darkly comic incisiveness that underpinned a magnificent vocal performance. “Emperor,” performed here in English, tells of Emperor Overall, a maniacal ruler who, regarding himself as nearly divine, declares war on all of humanity and claims that Death will be his standard-bearer. Death, who in this work represents peaceful release (and has a moving, poetic aria to that effect), is offended by Overall’s presumptuousness and disgusted by the grim mechanization of modern warfare. When he resigns in protest, the sick and mortally wounded are unable to die, and Overall’s realm soon begins to collapse in chaos and desperation. He begs Death to return, and Death agrees, so long as Overall is the first to die. The score, for a small cast and a chamber ensemble, is beautifully wrought, with richly expressive vocal writing, colorful instrumental interludes (including one staged as a zombie dance) and affecting allusions to Bach chorales and Mahler’s Lied von der Erde, and less direct evocations of Brahms songs and the pre-war German theater style most closely associated with Weill. It also makes specific political points: Overall, or Überall, in the original German, is a reference to the Nazi anthem, Deutschland, Deutschland, Über Alles, quoted parodistically when Overall’s declaration of total war is read in the opera’s first scene. Listening to this opera you have to wonder: What were Ullmann and Kien thinking? Could they have believed that the show-camp nature of Terezin, or their prominence in its artistic life, would shield them? If so, they miscalculated. After attending a rehearsal in the fall of 1944, the authorities canceled the production and sent Ullmann and Kien to Auschwitz, where both died -- Ullmann in a gas chamber two days after his arrival" [Allan Kozinn, 2/2/11].



February 2

John Adams's Nixon in China (libretto by Alice Goodman) is finally performed at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, NY. Through February 19. "During a panel discussion about Nixon in China on . . . [Feburary 1] Peter Gelb turned to the team of onetime artistic rebels who created this work for its Houston Grand Opera premiere in 1987 and suggested that back then, surely, no one involved had had any ambitions for the Met. Other than 'for its dismantlement,' Mr. Gelb added. All the panelists onstage -- the composer John Adams, the director Peter Sellars, the choreographer Mark Morris, the designer Adrianne Lobel and the baritone James Maddalena, who created the title role -- laughed. No one disagreed. But . . . [the next] night that same team, joined by the librettist Alice Goodman, seemed elated to have arrived at the Met with their path-breaking opera. When Mr. Adams, who conducted the performance, first appeared in the pit, he received a cheering ovation from a full house. And practically the first person on her feet during the standing ovation at the end, nearly four hours later, was Tricia Nixon Cox (who during the first intermission had posed for a photo backstage with her operatic 'parents'). This is the second John Adams opera to reach the Met. But the company that presented his Doctor Atomic in 2008 is a different place from the Met of 24 years ago. Under Mr. Gelb the house now actively courts contemporary works and modern productions. In 1987 Nixon in China went directly from Houston, where critical reactions were all over the place, to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, with no thoughts of breaking into Lincoln Center. The standard thing to say would be that the Met’s embrace of Nixon in China is way overdue. The opera and the production may have come to the Met at just the right time to comprehend the continuing resonances of this audacious and moving opera. Far from being trendy, the idea of an opera about President Richard M. Nixon’s trip to China in 1972, which came from Mr. Sellars, was inspired. In essential ways nothing really happened during that diplomatic journey. Yet in the larger scheme the trip was momentous. For America, as Mr. Sellars said during the panel, it represented the collapse of a 'mental wall,' and the recognition of 'one-fifth of the planet.' Here was Nixon, an 'old cold warrior/Piloting towards an unknown shore,' as he refers to himself in Ms. Goodman’s poetic libretto. The meeting of Mao and Nixon was fabulous diplomatic theater. And no art form is better suited to momentous spectacle than opera. With the exception of Henry Kissinger, all the historic players in the drama are treated seriously and given a dignity that allows for plenty of humor and absurdity. Since its premiere Mr. Sellars and his team have essentially been adapting the original production to subsequent stages. This specific production, which played at the English National Opera in 2006, was rebuilt for the larger dimensions of the Met’s stage. But Mr. Sellars’s concept, which presents the story with vivid realism and fanciful style, is unaltered. When you get something right at the start, why change it? The opera opens outside an airfield in Beijing, where a contingent of Chinese Army, Navy and Air Force personnel -- dressed in Dunya Ramicova’s costumes, which have a touching workaday look -- solemnly sing a chorus. Immediately . . . the rich inventiveness of Mr. Adams’s score . . . come[s] through. In the subdued orchestra, overlapping patterns of ascending minor scales create a hypnotic, quietly intense backdrop, pierced by fractured, brassy chords like some cosmic chorale. The chorus sings Ms. Goodman’s elegant couplets ('Soldiers of heaven hold the sky/The morning breaks and shadows fly') in intoned phrases. Mr. Adams has acknowledged his debt here to Philip Glass, especially the opera Satyagraha. But it is one thing when Mr. Glass sets Sanskrit in staccato bursts to lend Satyagraha a ritualistic allure. . . . The scene in which the presidential plane descends for the arrival of Nixon and his entourage remains musically exhilarating and theatrically dazzling. The orchestra erupts with big band bursts, rockish riffs and shards of fanfares: a heavy din of momentous pomp. Soon after Nixon is greeted by Chou, the president breaks into the News aria. Swept up, almost in a seizure, with the significance of greeting Communist China on its own turf, Nixon sputters the words 'News has a kind of mystery.' And here the staccato vocal writing perfectly conveys Nixon’s awkward stiffness and self-consuming power. . . . Making your Met debut in your mid-50s must be both gratifying and high-pressured. But it would have been impossible to bring any other Nixon to the Met for this premiere. Mr. Maddalena inhabits the character like no other singer, and as he said during the panel, he loves this outrageous and complex character, an affection that came through here. Mr. Maddalena was riveting in the long scene in which Nixon meets the frail yet feisty Mao, here the tenor Robert Brubaker in a performance that captures the chairman’s authoritarian defiance and rapacious self-indulgence. . . . [A] coup de théâtre . . . takes the Nixons to a performance of the revolutionary ballet The Red Detachment of Women, choreographed here, as in the premiere, by Mark Morris. The scene imagines the emotional reactions of the first couple to the story of a poor peasant woman abused by a sadistic tyrant until she saves herself through the virtues of Communism. Pat Nixon, apparently taking the ballet as real, goes rushing to the aid of the young dancer as she is whipped, and the horrified president attends to her. The music is a riot of clashing styles, with evocations of agitprop and Straussian voluptuousness stirred up with jazzy blasts. The coloratura soprano Kathleen Kim delivered the skittish, shrieking vocal lines of the malevolent Madame Mao with maniacal intensity. . . . As a conductor Mr. Adams brought an obvious command of the metric complexities of the score to his performance. I like that he never pushed the music and tried to tease out its mysticism and hazy harmonic richness. As with all his operas, Mr. Adams insisted that the singers wear body microphones. . . . [T]he . . . orchestration . . . [features] synthesizer, two pianos, four saxophones and brasses aplenty" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 2/3/11].




February 3

Eugene Drucker's Sonnets and a Soliloquy, Alban Berg's Lulu Suite, and Samuel Barber's Dover Beach, performed by the Escher String Quartet and the bass-baritone Andrew Nolen. Symphony Space, New York, NY. "Drucker said a listener might hear echoes of Bartok, his favorite composer, and the harmonic language of Berg and the Second Viennese School, an aesthetic that resonates strongly with him. That aesthetic could indeed be detected in his setting of seven Shakespeare sonnets and a soliloquy from Hamlet. Mr. Drucker, who has a longstanding interest in Shakespeare, wanted to notate the rhythms and pitch fluctuations of an expressive recitation, without lengthening any syllable beyond its speech value. The result was tentative, with the vocal line a sort of expressionist sprechstimme (a cross between speaking and singing) that sounded rather bland, especially in Hamlet’s tortured soliloquy from Act I, Scene 2. But the quartet writing, which incorporates serial techniques, is richly scored. Mr. Drucker effectively used tone painting to illuminate the texts, as in the pulsating measures that accompany the first line of Sonnet 60: “Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore.” Mr. Drucker read that sonnet and Sonnet 27; in the program book he writes that since it was his goal to explore the boundaries between speech and singing, he decided to include two sonnets to be spoken. Sonnet 129 was the most vividly rendered, with its agitated strings and dissonant harmonies reflecting Shakespeare’s startling depiction of lust. Mr. Nolen sang with greater conviction in Barber’s Dover Beach, which concluded the program, expressively rendering the text by Matthew Arnold. Here and earlier in the program the fine musicianship of the Escher members — Adam Barnett-Hart, first violinist; Wu Jie, second violinist; Dane Johansen, cellist; and Pierre Lapointe, viola — resulted in cohesive, spirited ensemble playing. . . . The Escher also offered a committed performance of Berg’s “Lyric Suite,” which meshes a modernist, 12-tone idiom with lyrical and romantic gestures. The quartet’s richly hued playing aptly conveyed the dramatic changes of mood in this sensual score, whose simmering tensions allude to the married composer’s illicit affair" [Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times, 2/4/11].



February 4

A multitude of Egyptian protesters sing their national anthem. Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt. "Cracks in the Egyptian establishment’s support for President Hosni Mubarak began to appear . . . as jubilant crowds of hundreds of thousands packed the capital’s central Tahrir Square to call for his ouster, this time unmolested by either security police or uniformed Mubarak loyalists. . . . [Protesters] abandoned their makeshift barriers to chant, pray and sing the national anthem around the center of the square, where newcomers carried in bags of bread and water. Tens of thousands of others demonstrated in Alexandria and Suez" [The New York Times, 2/4/11].


February 10

Tell the Way, with Nico Muhly, Bishi, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, and members of the American Contemporary Music Ensemble. St. Ann’s Warehouse, New York, NY. "[A] good-naturedly shaggy, loosely travel-theme evening featuring . . . Muhly, who wrote or helped write 8 of the program’s 11 pieces and played piano throughout. It was an eclectic program, with other performers: there was a surreal piece about the Eiffel Tower (by Bryce Dessner of the band the National), some banjo, an Anglican prayer of thanksgiving, and Indian rhythms. Mr. Muhly’s style combines a talent for complex yet transparent choral writing with Minimalist arpeggios and repetitions. At his best, he subtly resists the considerable surface beauty of his music. In Jerusalem, he and the quietly charismatic folk singer and songwriter Sam Amidon adapted an eerily ecstatic 18th-century hymn. Once or twice Mr. Amidon vocalized on 'da' for a few beats instead of singing words, and the accompaniment was jittery and changeable. It was as if singer and players were improvising, about to go off the rails, and it worked perfectly. . . . Before the performance of Mr. Dessner’s Tour Eiffel, Mr. Muhly said that the song was about 'travel, the anxieties and delights thereof.' But the evening, despite its wide range of sources, was nearly free of anxiety, or almost any mood other than blandly elegiac uplift. This was gently melancholy, vaguely hopeful music, the kind best listened to while staring through a window at the rain. . . . [T]he British musician Bishi -- in a white fur coat over a futuristic black-and-white pants-and-bustier combo, her hair twisted like a Swiss roll cake -- had a striking look and a clear voice, [and] her sound was a fairly standard combination of choral chant, French chanson and nods to her South Asian heritage. Her ambitious Look the Other Way, with Bishi playing sitar, had an ominous military feel and an Electric Light Orchestra lushness until a bhangra beat abruptly transformed it . . . . Its forced global style gave an unintended spin on the evening’s central question. Why does she flee through the world, indeed? [Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times, 2/11/11].


February 16

Jeremy Denk performs Gyorgy Ligeti’s Études. Zankel Hall, New York, NY.

Maude Maggart. Oak Room, Algonquin Hotel, New York, NY. "I Wish It So [is] a gorgeous, little-known Irish-flavored ballad by Marc Blitzstein from his 1959 show, Juno. . . . The title of her show, Everybody’s Doin’ It, comes from the perky Irving Berlin song" [Stephen Holden, The New York Times, 2/20/11].


February 19

Young Concert Artists celebrates its 50th anniversary with a well-attended 12-hour marathon. Symphony Space, New York, NY. "[H]ighlights . . . included the pianist Jeremy Denk’s virtuosic, thoughtful account of Book 1 of Ligeti’s Études . . . . The violinist Juliette Kang . . . joined the cellist Efe Baltacigil for a dynamic rendition of the Presto from Kodaly’s Duo (Op. 7); and the clarinetist Daniel McKelway and the pianist Gleb Ivanov offered a colorful interpretation of Debussy’s Rhapsodie" [Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times, 2/21/11].


February 22

Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "The orchestra, founded as the Palestine Symphony Orchestra in 1936, is celebrating both its 75th birthday and the 50th anniversary of Zubin Mehta’s first conducting engagement with it in 1961. Mr. Mehta, 25 when he first led the orchestra, became its music director in 1969. In 1981 his appointment was extended for life. . . . The program opened with the young Israeli composer Avner Dorman’s new orchestral arrangement of his Azerbaijani Dance, originally a piano work. Vivacious and appealing in its initial form, Mr. Dorman’s piece was transformed here into an exuberant display of vibrant hues and mottled quarter-tones, its propulsive odd-metered rhythms garnished with brilliant metallic percussion and crafty effects. . . . Ending the concert was a passionate and assured account of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. That these players could make Mahler’s borrowings from Jewish folk and liturgical traditions sound authentic and soulful was no surprise. Mr. Mehta too is a seasoned Mahlerian" [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 2/23/11].


February 23

London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Valery Gergiev, performs Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 7. Avery Fisher Hall, New York, NY. "Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, composed during the summers of 1904 and 1905, is generally considered the most problematic and baffling of his works in the form. The piece may be the least programmed and the last that most conductors learn, often simply because they have set out to perform the complete Mahler symphony cycle. I, too, have been confounded, though fascinated, by this lurching, extreme 80-minute work in five movements. So I was all the more impressed by the exhilarating and revelatory performance that Valery Gergiev, conducting the London Symphony Orchestra, gave . . . . This was the first of three concerts with which Mr. Gergiev will conclude his survey of the Mahler symphonies, which began last fall with five programs at Carnegie Hall featuring the Mariinsky Orchestra. . . . . Since becoming the London Symphony’s principal conductor in 2007, he has formed a palpable bond with the accomplished players, who were with him all the way during this visceral, glittering and organic account of the teeming Seventh. Unlike most other Mahler symphonies, this one has no programmatic backdrop. The sprawling first movement, lasting nearly a half-hour, begins with a strange march, halting and heavy at first, then increasingly animated and finally frenzied. From the start this music is steeped in ambiguity. Is the march funereal? Celebratory? Inexorable? Ironic? Rather than resolve the ambiguity, Mr. Gergiev embraced it, drawing consistently incisive, colorful, richly characterized playing from the inspired orchestra. During the bucolic episodes in the middle of this first movement, the music emerged here hushed, tender yet tense. You never quite trusted your inclination to be soothed by the cowbells and the pastoral horn calls, the lyrical passages for wistful strings. As the movement returned to its crazed mode, Mr. Gergiev and his players dispatched it like some strangely rousing, out-of-sync fight song, full of disjointed phrases and thematic fragments. Mahler labeled the second and fourth movements each 'Nachtmusik,' usually translated as nocturne, though Bernstein called it music of nightmares in his 1967 essay Mahler: His Time Has Come. These two movements frame a central ghostly scherzo. Describing all three movements, run through with hints of fractured folk tunes and curious passages highlighting the mandolin and guitar, Bernstein wrote that 'you can hear some of the loveliest, most tuneful, lilting and campy music ever written.' Mr. Gergiev’s performance caught those qualities, especially the campy veneer, which is somehow crucial to preventing the music from slipping into sentimentality and keeping its strangeness on the surface. In a memorable phrase, the critic and program annotator Michael Steinberg wrote that as a young man, when he first heard the finale of the Mahler Seventh, it sounded like 'someone’s grotesque and futile attempt to remember how the ‘Meistersinger’ Overture goes.' That Wagner work, though never quoted, pulses in spirit throughout this finale, 'wild and wonderful' in Steinberg's words. Mahler seized on the Wagner for its heady mix of stately march music, industrious counterpoint, soaring chorale tunes and good-humored busyness. But he processed everything through his Mahlerian blender. The hall was packed for the performance, and the ovation was enormous. This Seventh sets a high standard for the Third and Ninth Symphonies, and the Adagio from the unfinished Tenth, much more familiar Mahler works, which will be performed in the final two programs" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 2/24/11].


February 24

Axiom performs Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel. Alice Tully Hall, New York, NY. "In 1971, the Rothko Chapel, a meditation space and museum supported by the art patrons and philanthropists Dominique and John de Menil, opened in Houston. Missing from the ceremony was Mark Rothko, the artist who had painted a series of 14 large canvases for the chapel. The year before the opening, Rothko, who had been experiencing severe depression, took his own life. In attendance was the composer Morton Feldman, Rothko’s friend from New York, who considered Rothko’s art a major influence on his own work. The de Menils asked Feldman to compose a piece for performance in the chapel. Before the year was out, Feldman had done so: the austerely beautiful, daringly static and pervasively quiet Rothko Chapel, scored simply for viola, celesta, percussion, two solo singers and wordless chorus. This is perhaps the most defining work of Feldman’s inimitable art. Yet though the piece has had wide impact within the sphere of contemporary music, it is seldom performed. Word must finally be getting out. Alice Tully Hall was nearly full on Thursday night for the second program of the TullyScope festival, when Axiom, an excellent contemporary music ensemble from the Juilliard School, and the Clarion Choir gave a pensive and mystical performance of the 30-minute Rothko Chapel in a fascinating program of works by Feldman and the Romanian-born modernist Gyorgy Kurtag. Feldman was inspired by the New York Abstract Expressionist school of painting, especially by Rothko, whose works seemingly do away with formal design and present images of soft-edged shapes and colors that evoke spiritual and psychological states. Feldman was emboldened by the Abstract Expressionist painters to compose music that similarly eluded formal design and strove for purity of expression, quietude and mysticism. The subdued spirituality of Feldman’s music is no longer so unusual. But what many listeners still find challenging is the lack of discernible exposition and development . . . . Rothko Chapel unfolds as a series of fragmentary viola lines, flickers of notes on the celesta, isolated wordless chords intoned by the chorus and subdued rhythmic figures in the percussion. Little shifts of harmony or fleeting pileups of instrumental sounds seem major musical events. But nothing disrupts the overall mood of ethereal beauty and spiritual loneliness. Until late in the piece, that is, when out of nowhere the viola plays a wistful 'quasi-Hebraic' melody, in Feldman’s term, a tune he had written as a teenager. Given the memorial nature of the piece, this uncharacteristic Feldman stroke seems spiritually right and musically gratifying. The calm, sensitive performance, conducted by Jeffrey Milarsky, conveyed the simplicity and directness of this wondrously restrained music. And the audience, which had listened with uncommon contemplativeness, gave the performers a long ovation. A performance of Feldman’s 1981 Bass Clarinet and Percussion, comparably soft-spoken and minimalist, was also engrossing. The concert began with Mr. Kurtag’s trio Hommage à R. Sch. (1990), inspired by Schumann, an intriguing series of short, aphoristic, pungently modern pieces played here compellingly by Christopher Pell, clarinetist; Jocelin Pan, violist; and Conor Hanick, pianist. The concert ended with Mr. Kurtag’s expressionist 25-minute song cycle Messages of the Late R. V. Troussova, a setting of 21 love poems by Rimma Dalos. Lauren Snouffer, a rich-voiced, agile young soprano, was very impressive in these vocally and dramatically demanding songs" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 2/25/11].


February 27

Valery Gergiev conducts the London Symphony in Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 9 and the Adagio from Symphony No. 10. Avery Fisher Hall, New York, NY. "[T]he . . . Orchestra['s] . . . clear, muscular playing was ideally suited to the troublesome hall, and its shining brasses, focused strings and utter clarity enlivened a space that rarely rewards other orchestras. The concert concluded Mr. Gergiev’s latest survey of the Mahler symphonies, begun at Carnegie Hall with the Mariinsky Orchestra in October and concluding with three London Symphony concerts last week. He chose to end on Sunday with Mahler’s end . . . two profound works that have usually (and conveniently) been interpreted as valedictory and focused on death. Mr. Gergiev’s moving but unsentimental interpretations, however, avoided any simplistic or programmatic, and certainly any schmaltzy, narrative. Nothing felt, as it often can in Mahler performances, contrived or done simply for effect. The climaxes were blazing yet never over the top, and textures were carefully layered: in the Adagio from the 10th, the horns formed a liquid foundation for the leaps in the strings. It was in certain ways a softening of Mahler, sincere rather than saccharine or sarcastic. You were less aware than usual of the composer’s abrupt shifts -- of style, dynamics, tempo -- not because those shifts weren’t present but because they occurred so seamlessly. In the second movement of the Ninth, which begins with a spirited dance and turns stranger and darker, the music seemed to transmute fluidly rather than simply switch. Even in the third-movement Rondo-Burleske, Mahler’s trademark dizzying transitions of mood felt organic. There were no exaggerated accents (the cheap way to channel this music’s eerily jaunty quality) or artificial spirit, just rhythmic precision in both the brass and the strings, more difficult but ultimately far stranger and more potent than blatant, easy grotesquerie. Despite his emphasis on accuracy, Mr. Gergiev was flexible in the rondo’s big lyrical theme, which anticipates the sublime final Adagio, played here with eloquence and dignity. And in the lengthening silences that gradually overcome the music at the end of the symphony, the London players made Avery Fisher Hall sound more alive than most orchestras do at their loudest" [Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times, 2/28/11].


February 28

The Minnesota Orchestra, led by Osmo Vanska, with the violinist Lisa Batiashvili, perform Ludwig van Beethoven's Violin Concerto (with Alfred Schnittke's cadenzas) and Jan Sibelius's Symphony No. 6 and 7. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "The exacting and exuberant Finnish conductor Osmo Vanska arrived as the music director of the Minnesota Orchestra in 2003, determined to lift this respected ensemble to world-class status. However such things are measured, there is no denying that Mr. Vanska has had enormous success. The orchestra sounded terrific . . . . In any event, for the larger public Mr. Vanska has been cultivating his orchestra’s reputation through its performances of Beethoven and Sibelius. This is the third season in a row that he and his players have presented works by only those composers for their annual Carnegie Hall program. Having recorded the complete Beethoven symphonies for the Bis label, Mr. Vanska and the Minnesota Orchestra have begun a new project to record the complete Sibelius symphonies. . . . The soloist was the immensely gifted and accomplished young violinist Lisa Batiashvili. All the impressive attributes of her playing were present here: a plush, shimmering, beautifully focused sound; impeccable intonation; rhythmic integrity; a winning combination of elegance and impetuosity. . . . A point of interest was Ms. Batiashvili’s decision to play first and final movement cadenzas by the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke, who died at 63 in 1998. Beethoven wrote no cadenzas for this work. Schnittke was an iconoclastic composer whose polystylistic works boldly juxtaposed contemporary and Neo-Classical idioms. In Schnittke’s first-movement cadenza, Ms. Batiashvili was joined by timpani playing the repeated four-note rhythmic motif with which the piece begins. But when the cadenza started to evoke other works (the slow movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, Brahms’s Violin Concerto, Berg’s Violin Concerto), it seemed gimmicky. Mr. Vanska’s penchant for laying out music clearly proved a boon to his performances of Sibelius’s Sixth and Seventh Symphonies in the second half. It was fascinating to hear these elusive, strange scores performed with such directness and intelligence. The Sixth, in four movements, is like Sibelius’s cosmic pastoral symphony. But every time some gracious dancing episode or folkloric melodic line seems to take hold, it merges into a symphonic haze with no discernible themes, transitions or developments. The third movement is like some intergalactic Mendelssohn scherzo. The finale is fitful and episodic. Yet spiritual calm pervaded the music in this engrossing performance, which made every curiosity come across as inevitable and right. Mr. Vanska and the Minnesota players were equally excellent in the single-movement 20-minute Seventh Symphony, in which Sibelius distills everything about the late-Romantic symphonic mystique into something spiraling, mystifying and awesome. The strings will break into a soaring line that hovers between a grand symphonic statement and a rambling outburst. Here, in 1924, Sibelius showed his inimitable way of composing something modern, even radical, qualities that came through in this exhilarating performance. Next season Mr. Vanska and the Minnesota Orchestra return to Carnegie Hall, this time with works by Tchaikovsky and Nielsen, a program that is fresher, though it would be nice to hear some of that American music for which they are being singled out" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 3/1/11].

Comment - The Cantilever of Chords / Lisa Scola Prosek

I was extremely gratified to see, in February’s Princeton Alumni Weekly, an article on the theory of Dmitri Tymoczko, entitled The Geometry of Chords. Tymoczko assembled all of the two-note chord combination, and perceived three-dimensional geometric shape, which enlightens the understanding of the physics of sound. For those of us who are lovers of the application of the Pythagorean two-dimensional models, this is exciting news. A mobius tape of chord patterns that gives composers a natural model of the way modulations occur in mathematics is worthy of study and application.

Reading this, and observing the chord patterns on the mobius tape, I became very excited as it mirrored exactly a chord progression pattern that I had devised for myself 15 years ago when I completed my masters in architecture and structural engineering at UW. Never able to become interested in the modeling of three-dimensional living space, I nonetheless applied all of the statics and physics that I learned for the board exams to music. Wandering lost in a world where the new musical systems were devised by Milton Babbitt to prevent “arbitrariness,” but seemed to me in themselves arbitrary, the applied physics of engineering filled the void for me and I began to compose from fundamental principles of physics that have served me well.

An error in architecture, or more specifically, the notion that design is elegant and therefore need not adhere to requirements of gravity and loads, leads to loss of life. If you design a balcony that cannot support the weight of a human being, you commit criminal negligence.

Since no one ever died from bad music, however, composers permit themselves some egregious abuse of the listeners, by ignoring:

1.The physiological ability of human beings to absorb and assimilate sounds,

2. The physical effect of the vibration and frequency of the sounds once they enter the room and decay about the listener.

Using again the balcony model we observe that, in order to support the load of a human being, a cantilevered balcony must not extend further than the strength of the load bearing material,
And must be adequate for the limits imposed by the weight of the human being.

Likewise, a musical event, chord, phrase, which is very much like a cantilever, for it extends the listener into a floating space, a musical space, must be adequate in it’s harmonic strength to support and be absorbed by the listener, to move him out into the space and not become redundant, and must conform to the limits and requirements of human physiological “tuning.”

The cantilever, or harmonic bridge of sound, must move at a velocity determined by the limits of human understanding and tuning. Not less than, or it becomes stale and no longer extends us further into space. Not faster than, or it becomes weak, and drops the listener. Otherwise the listener is “dropped”, much like the man standing on a balcony, for the cantilever of his attention span is broken, and the musical event is no longer continuous. This makes the listener distracted, and causes him to lose the flow of the composer’s intention.

There are a number of points mentioned above that need further clarification.

By human physiological limits, I mean both the limit of his comprehension, and the limit of his “tuning” which I will elaborate below.

•Human “tuning” is much like human weight, a function of the forces around us. Any object under pressure, which we most certainly are, (thousands of pounds of atmospheric pressure, gravitational pressure, the pressure of all of the water in our bodies as it pushed against our skin and the atmosphere around us), has a specific tuning that will respond to vibrations, oscillations, and wave forms that are sympathetic to this tuning, A perfect example of this mystery of our existential tuning was so clearly exemplified by the collapse of the Tacoma narrows bridge, when an oscillation that reoccurs through the winds of the Tacoma narrows amplified the tuning of the bridge itself until the bridge collapsed. Certain oscillations, between notes and chords, amplify our physiological tuning in a discernible way, creating pleasure or pain, or worse, having little or no effect whatsoever. We can gauge how effective a modulation was, as we glance across an audience, to see everyone in the hall react at the same moment to a specific harmonic event. Or we can play through Tymoczko’s mobius tape of the geometry of chords, and try to discern our own physical reaction to the oscillation between chords.

•The limits of human comprehension in real time, is a variable, yet after years of teaching music to small children, I noticed that the variations occur between a narrow band of real human limits. Obviously if we have a listener with extraordinary auditory sophistication, then two dimensional phrase events like “ a twelve-tone row based on a hymn sung by my mother, which occurs as a palindrome in two simultaneous voices”, might be heard on the first listen, the likelihood is however, that no-one in the room, not even the composer, will grasp it, if it is played allegro (It never ceases to amaze me after 10 years of performing new works, how much of their own music composer’s fail to grasp).

The question is, therefore, if it exceeds the listener’s grasp, has it occurred?

For most listeners, much like the tree that fell in the woods, the answer is no.

Now a certain amount of these private composerly references and jokes are a delight in Mozart, since they occur while the stream of comprehensible musical information is uninterrupted. And if we require our musical cantilever “balcony” to support human beings, we might want to consider the real physiological limits of auditory understanding, and try to support our listeners with events that can be grasped in real time.

In conclusion, if I can return to the idea of a cantilever, a balcony, a bridge that music extends for us in space and which must be strong enough to support our thinking and our harmonic tuning, there is a leap that occurs between two cantilevers, or that area in the bridge where the net stress is 0, this is the area that I concluded 15 years ago, that needed to be supported on both sided so it could occur effectively, without dropping the listener. This is the transition between two fundamental chords at any point in the musical piece.

It was my understanding, and my unwillingness to put my listeners “at risk of falling” that to establish this cantilever of chords, the Pythagorean principle of sound decay had to be safely in play. In other words, to make the transition between one chord and the next, the strength of the tonalities from the first chord had to be clearly in the room before we could leap to the next tonality. This made the cantilever “safe.”

It also made it natural, and able to effect a harmonious reaction in the listener, to increase their enjoyment of the suspension, of the feeling of being suspended, of not being dropped.

Certainly if the great music of the world makes us feel as if we are flying above the earth, I had discovered the simple applicable principle of the physics of sound which made it so.

Recording

Ethan Wickman. Portals and Passages. Nicholas Phillips, pianist. Albany. "Wickman [is] a composer based at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. . . . Last year two appealing pieces appeared on disc simultaneously: Angles of Repose, recorded by the new-music group Zeitgeist (Innova), and Namasté, performed by the Avalon String Quartet (Albany). Now comes the first album entirely devoted to Mr. Wickman’s music, featuring piano works composed from 2003 to 2010 as played by Nicholas Phillips, a Wisconsin faculty colleague. The music here, essentially tonal, pledges allegiance to no particular ism, save for a personable eclecticism rooted in respect for tradition. Mr. Wickman sometimes puts his forebears to work. From the rolling agitation that opens Invention for St. Vincent in the Mezquita, inspired by a Spanish cathedral built in the heart of a former mosque, emerges a passage from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2, that evokes both architecture and piety. A nostalgic song by Mr. Wickman’s great-grandfather, Alfred M. Durham, provides In Winter: Reverberations on a Theme with material for melancholy elaboration. And the frisky finale of Inside the Hubble Toolbox, a four-part suite by turns epic and dreamy, spins out from a fleck of the Allegretto of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. Elsewhere Mr. Wickman’s borrowings are more spiritual than literal. You might sense late Brahms in the measured reverie of Passages for Piano, while in Forbidden Parallels the influences of gamelan and early Copland intertwine amiably. Mr. Phillips is an able and persuasive advocate throughout. Start here, then proceed to the Zeitgeist and Avalon recordings" [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 2/4/11].

21ST-CENTURY MUSIC / March 2011

21ST
CENTURY
MUSIC


March 2011

Volume 18, Number 3


Positively Mona Lyn Reese / Mark Alburger

Chronicle of January 2011

By the Numbers

Illustration / Renee Fleming


Editorial Staff

Mark Alburger
EDITOR-PUBLISHER

Harriet March Page
ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Patti Noel Deuter
ASSISTANT EDITOR

Erling Wold
WEBMASTER

Alexis Alrich
Katherine Buono
Ken Bullock
A.J. Churchill
David Cleary
Jeff Dunn
Phillip George
Elliot Harmon
Brian Holmes
Jeff Kaliss
John Lane
Arel Lucas
Michael McDonagh
Chip Michael
Tom Moore
William Rowland
Andrew Shapiro
CORRESPONDENTS


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Positively Mona Lyn Reese / Mark Alburger

Mona Lyn Reese is a neoclassic composer based in San Jose, who has spent much of the past decade in Germany and India. Her husband Thomas Hassing has served as her librettist in several operas. I caught up with Mona at her comfortable home in the north of town on January 13, 2011.

ALBURGER: So, you've only been back from India for a couple of years.

REESE: We got back in July of 2008. And then Tom started working at Global Foundries, where he's the Director of Intellectual Property.

ALBURGER: And meanwhile he writes.

REESE: Yes, he does. He was actually in the last production of The Three Fat Women of Antibes at San Jose State. The part that he played was a supernumerary who only appears at the end, and only in one piece. The director said, "We're having a hard time finding someone to play the part." So I said, "Tom will do it." "Really, do think so?" "Well, he's going to be there anyway, so, why not? He knows the lines!" Then I came to find that Tom had never been in a play in his life, not even as a child. Not even a Nativity play at church; he hadn't even been a shepherd. But he does a lot of acting classes. When I worked with young kids, getting them to write their own operas (at one of the places I've worked in that capacity: The Twin Cities Opera Company), Tom was helping with the writing. He was great; he was playing the mirror game -- he was fantastic! We've been together for 25 years, and I never knew that he had never been on the stage!

ALBURGER: So, how'd he do?

REESE: He was good.

ALBURGER: Good?

REESE: He wasn't great. He was terribly nervous. He was really nervous. Fortunately, for him, the person who was the director is a really good friend. We were friends with Daniel Helfgott and Barbara Turner before we did this project. So Daniel and Tom had to have a little coaching, and their coaching was to go for a long walk, without Barbara and me. And then Tom got a hat that he was supposed to wear.

ALBURGER: Something to help him be in the character.

REESE: To be in the character. And, once he had his hat, which we got him pretty quickly (he was supposed to be a 1930's playboy-prince, with a white hat, and once he had it to make gestures, it was....

ALBURGER: Magic. The Magic Feather.

REESE: A magic thing! He went from stiff and horrible to...

UNISON: Good.

REESE: Yes, not great...

ALBURGER: But good.

REESE: The improvement was marked. And once we got to the performances... he was good.

ALBURGER: So that series of performances was in...

REESE: 2009.

ALBURGER: 2009. What else has been happening?

REESE: Oh, I finished recording Choose Life, with the San Jose Choral Project and San Jose Chamber Orchestra. It's an hour long I-really-don't-know-what-to-call-it. It's for chorus, soloists, and orchestra. There's a Gregorian chant choir and a narrator. When it's performed, everybody dresses up. It's about the Holocaust, and everybody dresses up like people of the time -- some rich, some poor. And it's staged. The people sing from the music, but directors usually have them -- depending on the size of the space -- moving around.

ALBURGER: Kind of like an opera-oratorio.

REESE: Kind of like an opera-oratorio. It was done in 2000 at the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis, which was the organization that commissioned it, a long time ago in the 90's. It's been performed quite a lot. In this recent production, they had dancers for some of it, with modern dancers from Notre Dame, who choreographed a couple of the pieces that were just really moving. So that finally, finally, finally happened, after years of trying to get the money, and get organized, and find somebody that could do it that wasn't going to be in the Czech Republic, or something like that. I don't mind working with European groups along those lines, but I wanted to do this in the United States, if I could. So I finally finished that. We just finished it in October.

ALBURGER: Finished it in terms of the performances?

REESE: Finished recording it at Skywalker Studio.

ALBURGER: Oh, wow.

REESE: Yes, because it's been performed a lot, and everybody does it differently. Now there's going to be a performance of that piece -- I don't if they're doing the whole piece, with all of the choruses -- by a group in New York. So, I've been doing that, and then I've been working on getting the promotions for Three Fat Women ready -- mailing lists...

ALBURGER: And that's going up again?

REESE: Well, excerpts from it, in a similar fashion as with San Francisco Cabaret Opera, at Bluegrass Opera, in Kentucky. The Bluegrass people are going to do six sets of new opera excerpts, and after they see how the pieces go and what the audience response is, they're going to choose two of the operas over the summer. But I've been working on the marking for Three Fat Women, and my daughter, who's also an opera singer, is really good at Excel and Word, and she's making a big mailing list, so I can market it. Because, if nobody knows about it, they why did I bother? Tom and I are also working on a new opera, but we're just in the libretto stages.

ALBURGER: Working title?

REESE: It's an unimportant book called The Glimpses of the Moon.

ALBURGER: The Glimpses of the Moon.

REESE: It's a romantic comedy. I don't like tragedy. I am a happy girl! I am a happy girl, and I don't... see... why... You know, almost every single new piece is this doom and gloom... So depressing. Nixon in China, or that man who was killed by the pirate terrorists, I can't think of the name...

ALBURGER: You mean The Death of Klinghoffer?

REESE: Klinghoffer! Yes, I do! Depressing...

ALBURGER: So that's not your thing?

REESE: Nah, no. So here I am, just telling you about my Holocaust Oratorio!

ALBURGER: Right! Well, so there you go!

REESE: But, you see, that was a commission!

ALBURGER: So, you naturally gravitate towards the happy, but you'll do a sad on spec.

REESE: Sure, but I'll tell you that the commissioners -- the Temple Israel, the Basilica of St. Mary, and the College of St. Benedict -- didn't want a horror story.

ALBURGER: Right. So, they wanted something uplifting.

REESE: A situation in which you would feel good -- or feel cleansed or uplifted -- by the end.

ALBURGER: Catharsis.

REESE: Yes, so that's what we did. And that's why we titled it Choose Life.

ALBURGER: Choose Life.

REESE: It's from Deuteronomy. There's a verse, "Today I will choose life."

ALBURGER: So that, would you say, would be a through-line in your work: the positive?

REESE: Yes.

ALBURGER: And where did this all start? Your background in music -- where did you get the spark?

REESE: Oh, you know, I'll tell you something: I always wanted to be a composer! I just did. I'm so dumb, Mark, that I thought... Listen, this is what I really and truly thought, that, if you wanted to compose music... Or, you know, if you wanted to major in English, you would go to the English Department and they would teach you... In music, they would teach you how to write... music. That's why you went to music school... I mean, of course, obviously, I knew that people wanted to, you know, play better, and so on, and I knew that that was part of it, but I really and truly thought that it was about composition. And, of course, it's true, you do go to music school and learn how to be a composer.

ALBURGER: Yes.

REESE: You do. But that was so much in my brain, that I couldn't imagine why anybody would go to college and major in English who wouldn't want to write stories, or write novels. Because, people that went to art school wanted to paint pictures, right?

ALBURGER: Sure.

REESE: And sculpt things and, you know, make macrame plant holders, or whatever. And I thought that's what you would do analogously in music. And I was in music school for the first two years or so, and I finally went up to a teacher. I went to the University of Minnesota at Morris, which was a very small school, and my parents lived in that town, and I lived a home. And I went to the head of the theory department, who was also a composer, and I knew that, because we had played his music in the concert band that I was in. And I said, "Dr. Johnson, I want to write music, and when do we take a course in composition?" He just looked at me, because most of the kids wanted to be music teachers. They were in education. They had their music, and that's what they were thinking about doing. My father was a barber. I said to my parents, "I really want to do this." They didn't know what to think. I knew, but I didn't know how to tell anybody, in a way. And, it's my mother's fault, because she always took me to concerts and such in Minneapolis when I was a little girl. She took me to Orchestra Hall when I was six, and I was sitting there, "I wanna do this! This is what I want!"

ALBURGER: What were some of the pieces that made the first impressions on you?

REESE: Oh, Handel. Our town orchestra did Messiah every year, and I remember looking forward to that all year long. I was a really tiny little kid. It was my thing. My father didn't care about that stuff. I had two brothers, and they were little, and didn't want to go. But I can remember going when I was six. Because I was sitting like this, you know? [demonstrates]. When you're six, and you're sitting in the adult chairs at the auditorium?

ALBURGER: Yes! Edith Ann....

REESE: And I didn't fall asleep. My mom took me when I was 12 to see Tosca. The Metropolitan Opera would come to Minneapolis -- they used to; they don't anymore. There was a traveling Metropolitan Opera. They came, and I saw Renata Tebaldi. I've never forgotten. I thought, "I wanna do that!"

ALBURGER: But not "sing that." "Write that."

REESE: Yes, I never wanted to sing it, but I wanted to be in it, somehow.

ALBURGER: You knew you wanted to buy into it in some way.

REESE: Yes. I wanted to be that. I wanted to do that.

ALBURGER: How far away is Minneapolis from your hometown?

REESE: A three-hour drive.

ALBURGER: It was a pilgrimage.

REESE: Kind of. Except that my grandmother -- my mom's mother -- lived there.

ALBURGER: So you had other reasons to go.

REESE: Yes, occasionally we would go just to attend. But usually it wasn't as if we would drive for three hours and see the event and come home..

ALBURGER: You'd stay.

REESE: We'd sleep over, or we'd go the day before. I know my mom's friend, Maxine, and her daughter also enjoyed the concerts. Plus we'd go to nice restaurants, matinees, and attend the Guthrie Theater. My mother really liked drama.

ALBURGER: In general, however, yours was a small-town rural situation.

REESE: Morris, Minnesota, but there's a branch of the University there.

ALBURGER: A small town with culture.

REESE: Yes, lot's of professors hanging around. At the time I lived there, it was quite a vibrant town. Now, I wouldn't say it's a ghost town, there's still lots of manufacturing... And the University is still there -- they've got a great campus -- a very vibrant life. But, previously, there were all of these great stores and restaurants, back in the 50's and 60's. And now, there's nothing.

ALBURGER: So you were born...

REESE: August 24, 1951.

ALBURGER: So the town was vibrant enough then for a good undergraduate education?

REESE: Yes, and then, for graduate school, before which I took some time off doing other things...

ALBURGER: The other things being?....

REESE: I went and I lived in Key West, Florida, for a little while, and just I was a lifeguard. I had done four years of academics in three years of school, and I had still graduated with honors, and I was fried.

ALBURGER: So it was time to do something different.

REESE: And I didn't know where I wanted to go to graduate school, so I went and I lived in Florida for a couple of years.

ALBURGER: Well, being in Minnesota for a certain length of time, it seems like Florida...

REESE: It seemed like it would be a great idea. So I did go there, and then, after that, I went to the University of Kansas, and I got my Masters in Music Composition.

ALBURGER: What were some of your earliest compositions? Were they done at the University, or before in Florida?

REESE: I never wrote anything in Florida. I didn't have a piano. I'll tell you, sometimes you can get really academically tired. And I was academically tired. I played my guitar and I didn't do anything musical except apply to graduate school. I did that.

ALBURGER: The Florida stint was?...

REESE: Just a year and a half.

ALBURGER: You had earned an extra year...

REESE: Yes, sort of like that. So then I was looking for a place to go to school, and I liked the composition program at the University of Kansas. I was accepted, I had done well -- my undergraduate marks were good. I studied there with John Pozdro and Edward Mattila -- my two main teachers. One is about a hundred by now.

ALBURGER: Another Elliott Carter. What about those first pieces?

REESE: I'm trying to remember. Pieces from grad school, some of them I still like. I wrote some songs, a piano piece, and some small chamber ensembles...

ALBURGER: Any titles come to mind?

REESE: I'm trying to think... This is terrible... Oh, I know. One song cycle that I wrote was called Love Poems to the Moon. Oh, I wrote a song that I still like -- I still like. And I get in trouble with ASCAP for it, too. It's a poem by Arthur Rimbaud called Le dormeur du val. Which is "The Sleeper in the Valley." It's an anti-war piece that he wrote some time in the 19th Century. It's a very good piece. It's a good piece. People still perform it, and I like it a lot. There's a pop artist from the 50's or 60's, his name was Yves Montand -- this French singer, who recorded a jazz version of music on this same poem. So they keep sending me his checks! I keep saying, "This is not my piece. This is not my piece."

ALBURGER: You never tried to cash one of those checks.

REESE: Well, yes, the checks are written out to me, because...

ALBURGER: They think it's your piece.

REESE: They think it's my piece, because he's a singer. But I didn't write that version. He was the lover of Edith Piaf, or somebody like that...

ALBURGER: Well, you're very honorable. Because, I've got to admit, when I have checks with my name on them from ASCAP, I cash them!

REESE: Well, you know what? It's easy to do, because sometimes there are a bunch of pieces, because I've done lots of arrangements for the Minnesota Orchestra when I lived in Minneapolis, and I might do Prokofiev. Well, I'm not really allowed to do an arrangement of Prokofiev, because he's still under the copyright. But they're only doing, you know, an excerpt for a children's concert; I'm not going to worry about it. But the orchestra could get in big, big, big, trouble if anybody from that publisher found out about it, and so could I. So that money, if it's going to anyone, is going to Prokofiev's heirs. So I just tell them, I did an arrangement of that, and they say, "Fine, fine, fine." We're not talking about a lot of money. This money I got from the anti-war piece was maybe a hundred dollars. It's nothing. Itunes sells an album of it for 99 cents, and somebody buys that song, and I get a check for 35 cents, or something. So there was that piece. And I wrote the big composition called, Three Moods for Piano, or something like that. You write these pieces...

ALBURGER: Do you keep a works list?

REESE: Oh, yes. And around this same time, I did get my first professional composition commission at 24, when I had not yet graduated from Kansas. I just had my thesis and defense to do. I had done my recital. Everything else was done.

ALBURGER: And this was for your Masters? Doctorate? Both.

REESE: I have a master's. I don't have a doctorate. So I worked in the Art Department. I was an art model.

ALBURGER: Ah.

REESE: I tell you that now that my parents are dead. They would be just shocked! They're rolling now, I'm sure! Yes, anyway, I worked in the Art Department, and was a model. I got to know the professors -- a lot of them very well. This one professor knew that I was a music student. The music department had lots and lots and lots of student concerts, usually held in large classrooms. Because, otherwise without recitals, if you don't hear your music and you don't get critiques, what's the point? You can't learn anything until you see what happens. So this teacher had come to hear my piece, just because he knew me from the art department. He liked what I wrote a lot, and he was making this documentary on different folk arts in Kansas -- people that make wavy sheets that go [makes a whirring sound], and have their whole yards full of these things -- all kinds of folk arts. He asked me to write the music for the film, and I was really surprised and pleased. He was able to get the Kansas Woodwind Quintet, from their Symphony Orchestra, to play it, with percussion.

ALBURGER: Woodwind quintet with percussion.

REESE: Yes. Woodwind quintet with percussion. I could have picked anything else, I guess. But at that time I was most comfortable with winds, because I was a flute player. That was easy for me. I knew I wouldn't screw up.

ALBURGER: When did you start playing flute?

REESE: Oh, I was eight. I was terrible.

ALBURGER: What?

REESE: I said "I'm terrible."

ALBURGER: Really?

REESE: I don't like to play. I can't say that's true. I wasn't terrible -- they gave me a degree in music! So, clearly, I wasn't terrible.

ALBURGER: Well, your focus was somewhere else.

REESE: I didn't get a degree in Music Composition as an undergraduate, because they didn't offer a Composition degree.

ALBURGER: Let me guess: They probably had Music Ed and Music Performance. Period

REESE: Yes. That's it, so I got the latter. They didn't have a Composition degree.

ALBURGER: Well, I have a degree that just says, "Music," from Swarthmore College. It's not specific at all.

REESE: Right. And, of course, when I went to the University of Kansas, I have a Master of Music in Theory and Composition. But the other one doesn't say anything. It just says, "Bachelor of Arts," and that's what I have.

ALBURGER: Sure.

REESE: So, it wasn't my joy. It was fun, I liked it. But I graduated, I got that degree in Flute Performance and I never played again.

ALBURGER: Wow, how about that.

REESE: Yes, I never did. I just wanted to write.

ALBURGER: Well, clearly, you were not great, you were "good."

REESE: I was good when I was 22, and then, if you never play again, you're not good anymore.

ALBURGER: That's true. But it gave you the behind-the-music experience, such that you were particularly comfortable writing for winds.

REESE: Yes. Actually, I can't say I never played again. I did, of course I played again. Oh, I played the double bass, too, when I was an undergraduate. When I lived to Key West, and I said, "I didn't do anything in music," well, that's not true, because the town was going to do, guess what?, my favorite piece, Messiah, and the town orchestra and choir (they were really terrible) didn't have anyone to play the bass. And I said, "Well, I know how to play the bass, but I don't have one." And so I got a bass from the school -- someone let me borrow one. I was not very good, but I was better than nobody.

ALBURGER: Well, yes, sure. Writing for woodwinds and percussion would suggest that you certainly by this time were now attuned to many composers beyond Handel.

REESE: Oh, sure. I was in graduate school.

ALBURGER: Were there 20th-century composers that particularly impacted on your reality?

REESE: You know, I really like Harry Partch.

ALBURGER: How about that? Me, too.

REESE: I love Harry Partch, you know, and he's so out there. And Lou Harrison.

ALBURGER: Those crazy Californians!

REESE: Well, we studied those composers. I went to a small school, but it didn't mean that they had idiots working there. They were good teachers and fine musicians.

ALBURGER: So you were even exposed to such composers as an undergraduate?

REESE: Oh yes, and I liked them. Do you remember those great big computers with punch cards?

ALBURGER: Yes.

REESE: We were doing a unit on computer music, and I had a boyfriend at the time who was taking computer at school -- a math major, computer, engineer, something like that. So we tried to get the computer to generate music for us. We didn't know what we were doing. It wasn't to make the computer play the music but just...

ALBURGER: Compose it.

REESE: And we had as mixed success as many doing this, but we did it. And it was fun.

ALBURGER: And that was as an undergraduate.

REESE: Yes, I suppose was maybe 19. And we had all these punch cards, and we'd get them in a line. And we couldn't have to print out on music paper, it would be numbers, and the numbers would mean certain things.

ALBURGER: And then you'd have to translate them.

REESE: Yes.

ALBURGER: That's a long time ago.

REESE: It's a very long time ago.

ALBURGER: I remember doing related things with spaceships orbiting the moon, with punchcards, and my spaceship "orbiting the moon," went right through the center of the moon.

REESE: Oh, good. Did it crash and burn?

ALBURGER: It must have. Multiple times. I guess that's why I turned away from computers for quite a while, but now I'm back.

REESE: Now you're back.

ALBURGER: Full guns. So, you got this first commission when you were still a graduate student, so that's good.

REESE: Well, yes, but I was done. I was done. I had to do my what-do-you-call-it-they-stand-up-and-ask-you-a-bunch-of-questions...

ALBURGER: The defense of your dissertation, or thesis...

REESE: Yes, that. Oral examination. That's what I hadn't done yet.

ALBURGER: Well, suddenly the world is before you. What happens next?

REESE: After that? I had moved to Minneapolis, because that's where my family was. I stayed with my grandmother for a few weeks, while I found an apartment. I got a job in a music store, signed up to play and sing in choir, just got connected. I got a job teaching theory for people who didn't read music -- for guitar players in rock bands, and so on. There was an alternative school called The West Bank School of Music, and I got a job teaching there.

ALBURGER: So it was basically moving to Minneapolis to seek your fortune.

REESE: Well, I moved to Minneapolis because I could knew I get a job. I certainly wasn't going move back to Morris. There was definitely nothing for me there, because I didn't have a doctor's degree, and I wouldn't be able to get a job at the University.

ALBURGER: Maybe even if you had a doctorate.

REESE: Well, I wouldn't want to live there. I wouldn't want to live there. But I never wanted to be a teacher, either. A lot of people think, "I'd like to be a university professor." I certainly would have done that. I went on one job interview, and I just thought to myself after the interview (because at that time you didn't need to have that Ph.D. -- you just needed to have a master's degree, and they cared more about whether you were good), "Golly, I don't want to do that." So I thought, "OK, fine. Well, I'll think of something. I'll do something." And I just thought, "I'm going to compose music," and I composed music, "That's what I'm going to do, I'm going to compose music." And so that's what I did. I mean, I did all sorts of other crappy jobs, too. And I worked at that music store, and I worked at the West Bank School of Music, and I gave guitar lessons at Golden Valley Lutheran College, and worked at a department store. All those kinds of things that musicians do.

ALBURGER: Sure.

REESE: And I kept getting commissions, and I kept doing that.

ALBURGER: So the commissions kept coming in, that's great.

REESE: They did. Not enough to pay very well...

ALBURGER: But enough to keep you interested.

REESE: Well, and the lessons...

ALBURGER: And like so many people, just kind of putting the career together out of various components.

REESE: Yes, and I did that until the time that Tom and I got married. And Tom makes a boatload of cash, so I don't have to do the icky stuff anymore. Oh, and you know, I did all these arrangements for the Minnesota Orchestra -- tons of them, it seems like there were hundreds of them. Well, it was OK. I actually wrote a piece for these kinderconcerts, in which they use an ensemble of nine musicians, and they put the childen on the stage (we're talking about people who are four and five years old), and the musicians are seated amongst them. The kids are right there. They play a bunch of different pieces, short. A slice of Prokofiev to get the good part -- you know, the theme. Each piece is maybe five pieces long, or two minutes long -- dozens of those. But I wrote one of those pieces, where they have a narrator -- a new piece for that ensemble. That piece is really taking off. Right now, the Atlanta Symphony is playing it.

ALBURGER: And that piece is called?

REESE: The Mitten. I'm sure you've read that story. It's about a little boy who goes to gather firewood and he's in some cold country -- Sweden or Norway or the Ukraine, or some place like that -- and he drops his mitten in the snow. In comes a little mouse, and she pops in there to get warm, and pretty soon a frog and an owl and a whole bunch of animals, until finally there's a bear. And they're all squished together in the mitten, and the last animal that comes is a little cricket. And she jumps in the mitten and it explodes. It just pops.

ALBURGER: I think I've come across that.

REESE: I'm sure you have, because it's a very popular story, and it's a folk tale type. I love that piece, it turned out really well. I was in my 30's when I wrote that, so it was real professional picece. It was a real piece... does that make sense?

ALBURGER: Sure. So, how much have you written on The Mitten?

REESE: Ten minutes.

ALBURGER: That's a pretty substantial piece for a children's concert, with short attention spans.

REESE: But it's a story, it's like Peter and the Wolf.

ALBURGER: Stories help.

REESE: It's one of the pieces that I'm transferring to Finale and Sibelius after using other programs.

ALBURGER: Do you notate by hand, or directly into the computer?

REESE: A little of both. When I'm thinking, I write by hand.

ALBURGER: You approach that by pencil and paper?

REESE: Yes. I do a lot of singing when I compose. I'm not a terribly wonderful pianist, I play.

ALBURGER: By now thought, you're probably better at piano than flute.

REESE: No, I don't know about that. But I sing it all, and get the notes that I want, and I write it down and work on that, then after a bit, if I want to massage or sequence it, I'll put it into the computer.

ALBURGER: A lot of people still do that. Erling Wold, who's much more high-tech than I have, does something similar. But my handwriting is so bad, the moment I got a music-writing program in 1993, I never looked back. As a consequence, I have virtually no sketches anymore.

REESE: I have sketches, and most people that I talk to do. But you write very differently than I do; yours is a real different approach.

ALBURGER: Yes. So there you are in Minneapolis, and you're putting together a career, and where does Tom come in?

REESE: I was married once before. I moved to Minneapolis, I met my husband Frank, and we got married in 1979. In 1982, we had our daughter. And then after some time, I can't exactly remember when, we split up. That happens to people.

ALBURGER: Yes, what was his profession.

REESE: He was a violinmaker. I met him in church. I did, because I was singing in this wonderful choir. It was an auditioned group, and he was in it. His family was from Minneapolis. So I met him, not because we were both particularly religious, but just because we were in that.

ALBURGER: But you do have a religious background. Just growing up in the upper midwest might suggest Lutheranism?

REESE: Lutheran, that's what I was. I did become an Episcopalian later on, just because I thought Lutheranism was... boring. I'm not religious at all. I'm not religious at all. It was awhile ago, and I never felt particularly religious. But I liked going to church. Especially I like liturgical thing. I like the music. If there isn't any music, I'm not interested.

ALBURGER: And the Episcopalians are probably going to give you more of a run for your money.

REESE: Well, actually, you know, the one I went to was pretty liturgical.

ALBURGER: Yes, Lutherans can be.

REESE: But I was not a church-going individual, apart from the music. And I did a lot of church gigs, you know, because they pay you. They pay you to go to church.

ALBURGER: Right. Why not!

REESE: Why not! I said that one time to my daughter when she was going through a period when she was feeling religious, and I said, "I don't go to church unless somebody pays me." That was like blasphemy! She was really upset! Oh my goodness, she was terribly upset. Then about two years ago -- she's now 29, so she's gotten through a lot of that (I think that she was 19 or 20 when I said that to her) -- she called up, and I asked her if she was singing High Holidays this year. She's an opera singer; she lives in Chicago. And she said, "Ah, it's just more trouble than it's worth." And I said, "What about Christmas?" and she said, "I'm not going to church unless anyone pays me."

ALBURGER: She's come around.

REESE: And then finally she stopped doing High Holidays and Christmas. And she said, "I'll just do a solo spot."

ALBURGER: Your daughter is named...

REESE: Greer Davis.

ALBURGER: And you're still living in Minneapolis at this point. Did things get easier when you were married?

REESE: Not really. No, it was about the same, because Frank was a violinmaker. We weren't rolling in money, but we were fine. And I dated Tom for a terribly long time, and we got married in 1997, and moved out here that same year.

ALBURGER: Divorced in...

REESE: In the late 80's. We separated, and we didn't get the divorce for a while. It might have been 1990, or 89. The big bump up to my career was that I was the Composer-in-Residence at the Minneapolis Opera, starting in 1992.

ALBURGER: Wow, that is a big bump. That's great. You had been working with the Minnesota Orchestra previous to this. Was there a connection made between those two?

REESE: No. Not really. Actually, I got the opera job because of Libby Larsen. Libby Larsen had been asked to do this project with the Twin Cities Opera Guild, which is a less wonderful group than Minnesota Opera, and she didn't have time. And she told them to call me, because she said, "Mona could do that. She'd be really good at that. She'd do it." I haven't seen her in a long time, but we lived kind of close to each other, and we'd have coffee, and stuff like that. So she said, "Ask Mona to do it." And they did, and I did. And I said, "OK, yes, I have time, and it will be great fun, and I'll do it." So I called up the person who was Composer-in-Residence at the Minnesota Opera, and asked him if he would help me in my new position at Twin Cities. His name was Stephen Houtz. He was the main Composer-in-Residence, and they had somebody else that would do some of the gigs, too. Because there were too many school gigs for him to do all of them. The other person that they had, unbeknownst to me, was horrible (not Stephen), and they fired her. And Stephen said, "We've got to get someone else." And Stephen was going to move to a different position at the opera, and they we're going to let him do it, and he said, "I know who you should get." Because I had had that interview with him, and he had come to see one of my gigs. And he said, "That's who you should have." And their Director of Education, or whatever, called me one day, and I practically fell on the floor, because you don't get those jobs. You don't apply for jobs like that, because, otherwise, they'd never get to the end of the applications. But, you know, that's how art business works. You get from this to that, and so on. So that's how I got that job, and I stayed there for a long time. In fact, I was there when Tom and I got married, and we moved to California, and I resigned. And they said, "You can't quit; we don't have anybody." And I said, "Yeah?" This was '97, and I'd been there since '92. And they said, "Just do two, three more gigs for us." And I did two, three more years.

ALBURGER: Wow, so you'd fly back?

REESE: I'd fly back.

ALBURGER: As Composer-in-Residence, did they did ever do any of your pieces?

REESE: No, of course not.

ALBURGER: Isn't that a funny term?

REESE: What you were supposed to do, and what you actually ended up doing were not the same thing.

ALBURGER: Still, it's a wonderful title. And a great experience, I'm sure.

REESE: It was. I did arrangements for them when they used to take pieces on the road, I did Magic Flute. A whole orchestra of however many it is and I reduced orchestrations for 20-30 people. And I gave little talks before the operas. They needed a composer on staff, because you need somebody that can "do things" -- that kind of stuff.