Tim Munro, flutes
Michael J. Maccaferri, clarinets
Matt Albert, violin
Nicholas Photinos, cello
Matthew L. Duvall, percussion
Lisa Kaplan, piano
The name eighth blackbird refers to the poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens, the eighth stanza of which reads:
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know
Grammy-winning eighth blackbird promises - and delivers - provocative and engaging performances to its burgeoning audiences. Combining bracing virtuosity with an alluring sense of irreverence, the sextet debunks the myth that contemporary music is only for a cerebral few. The ensemble attracts fans of all ages to its performances and recordings, which sparkle with wit and pound with physical energy; it inhabits and explores the sound-world of new music with comfort, conviction, and infectious enthusiasm. eighth blackbird is widely lauded for its performing style - often playing from memory with theatrical flair - and for making new music accessible to wide audiences. The New York Times raved: "eighth blackbird's performances are the picture of polish and precision, and they seem to be thoroughly engagedby music in a broad range of contemporary styles." Profiled in the New York Times and NPR's All Things Considered, the sextet has also been featured on Bloomberg TV's Muse, CBS News Sunday Morning, St. Paul Sunday, Weekend America, and The Next Big Thing, among others. The group is in residence at the University of Richmond in Virginia and the University of Chicago. Further information about the ensemble may be found on the eighth blackbird web site at http://www.eighthblackbird.com.
eighth blackbird is presented through arrangement with Opus 3 Artists, 470 Park Avenue South, 9th Floor North, New York, New York 10016.
Thomas Adès (born London, March 1, 1971)
Catch
(composed 1991)
Early on, Thomas Adès caught attention as a pianist, capturing second
prize as BBC Young Musician of the Year in 1989. He studied piano with
Paul Berkowitz and composition with Robert Saxton at London’s Guildhall
School of Music and Drama, going on to King’s College, Cambridge, to study
with composers Alexander Goehr and Robin Holloway. Adès was composer
in residence with the Hallé Orchestra from 1993 to 1995, and music director
of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, 1998 to 2000. He served as
artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts from 1999
to 2008, and for the 2007/2008 season held the Richard and Barbara Debs
Composer Chair at Carnegie Hall.
The music of Thomas Adès has received numerous awards, including a Paris
Rostrum for the best work by a composer under thirty, two Royal Philharmonic
Society Prizes in 1997 and 2005 , a 1998 Elise L. Stoeger Prize, a 1999
Salzburg Easter Festival Prize, a 2001 Hindemith Prize. Adès was the
2000 recipient of the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for his
orchestral work Asyla.
Catch, op. 4 was composed in 1991. It premiered at St. George’s,
Brandon Hill, Bristol, on November 25, 1993, with Lynsey Marsh on clarinet,
Anthony Marwood on violin, Louise Hopkins on cello, and the composer on
piano. Adès has the seated string players and pianist resisting the
advances of the wandering clarinetist trying to join them. Andrew
Clements of The Guardian has described Catch as having “a sense of
unbuttoned fun with sinister undertow.”
Pierre Boulez (born Montbrison, Loire, France, March 26, 1925)
Dérive 1
(composed 1984)
In a 1958 essay, Pierre Boulez described his music as “organized delirium,” an appropriate oxymoron for the style of a composer who came to music by way of mathematics. His industrialist father had hoped Boulez would become an engineer. But even while studying higher mathematics in preparation for that career path, Boulez also studied piano and music theory. In 1942, he enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire rather than the Ecole Polytechnique, much to his father’s dismay. At the Conservatoire, Boulez studied musical analysis with Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992), was introduced to serialism by René Leibowitz (1913-1972), and took counterpoint privately with Andrée Vaurabourg (1894-1980), wife of the composer Arthur Honegger. Around this time, Boulez began composing.
In 1946, at the suggestion of Honegger, Boulez became the musical director of the new theatre company founded by Jean-Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renaud. In 1954, the company supported Boulez in founding the Domaine Musical concert series, where he sharpened his conducting skills. In 1968, he became the principal conductor of both the New York Philharmonic and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and in 1969, the principal guest conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. In the 1970s, Boulez became the prime mover behind Paris’s Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique. Out of IRCAM in 1974 came the Ensemble Intercontemporain, dedicated to new music. In 1995, Boulez became principal guest conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Boulez was the 2001 recipient of the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for his chamber work Sur Incises.
Like so many of Boulez’s compositions, Dérive 1 does literally derive from an earlier work of his. Scored for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, vibraphone, and piano, Dérive 1 grows out of various versions of Répons from 1980-1984 (“mostly music I left out,” Boulez has said), which in turn borrowed material from Poésie pour pouvoir from 1958. Dérive 1 pays tribute to two people. It was written for the 1984 retirement of Sir William Glock (1908-2000), who brought Boulez into association with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. At the musical core is a multilingual transliteration of the surname of Paul Sacher (1906-1999) into the six pitches of E-flat (“Es” in German), A, C, B-natural (“H” in German), E, and D (or “ré”). Sacher was a conductor and prominent Swiss musical patron. All six notes sound in the opening piano chord. Dérive 1 was first performed in London on January 31, 1985, by the London Sinfonietta conducted by Oliver Knussen.
Stephen Hartke (born Orange, New Jersey, July 6, 1952)
Meanwhile
(composed 2007)
Born west of the Hudson in Orange, New Jersey, Stephen Hartke grew up in Manhattan, where he was immersed in his first musical influences including Medieval plainchant, Guillaume de Mauchaut, Guillaume Dufay, Thomas Tallis, and Thomas Weelkes. As a choirboy at New York’s Church of the Transfiguration (popularly known as “The Little Church Around the Corner”), he would sing with the New York Pro Musica, the New York Philharmonic, and the Metropolitan Opera. He would go on to study at Yale, the University of Pennsylvania (where he was a student of George Rochberg), and the University of California at Santa Barbara. Since 1987, he has been on the composition faculty of the University of Southern California. From 1988 to 1992, he was Composer in Residence with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.
Concerning Meanwhile, subtitled “Incidental Music to Imaginary Puppet Plays,” Stephen Hartke has written:
It is one of several works of mine that has grown from a
long-standing fascination I have had for various forms of Asian court and
theater music, and from a fantasy in which I imagine myself the master of my
own fictional non-Western musical tradition. In preparing to write this
piece, I studied video clips of quite a number of puppet theater forms,
ranging from the elegant and elaborate, nearly-life-sized puppets of
Japanese Bunraku, to Vietnamese water puppets, both Indonesian and Turkish
shadow puppets, and to classic Burmese court theater that mixes marionettes
with dancers who look and act like marionettes. All of these theatrical
forms have their own distinct musical styles and structures, and I confess
to being especially fascinated by the stark vividness of their instrumental
coloration and the often unexpected structural quirks that they have evolved
as these traditions have taken shape over the centuries and become stylized.
This piece, then, is a set of incidental pieces to no puppet plays in
particular, but one in which the imaginary scenes have given rise to an
idiosyncratic sequence in which the sound of the ensemble has been
reinvented along lines that clearly have roots in these diverse Asian
models. The piano, for instance, is prepared for much of the piece with
large soft mutes used to transform the color of the middle register into
something that rather resembles the Vietnamese hammer dulcimer. The viola
is tuned a half-step lower in order both to change its timbre and to open
the way for a new set of natural harmonics to interact sometimes even
microtonally with those of the cello. The percussion array includes 18 wood
sounds, from very high Japanese Kabuki blocks to lower range slit drums,
plus 4 cowbells, 2 small cymbals, and a set of bongos. These are set up in
keyboard fashion so that the player can play them all as a single
instrument. Finally, there is a set of Flexatones, which are rather like
small musical saws. Three of these are held together with a wooden clamp
and are played by the pianist with a mallet, their pitch being altered by
pressing down on their metal flanges. The tone is rather like that of small
Javanese gongs, and so I have given this new instrument the name of
Flexatone Gamelan.
Meanwhile is played as a single movement, with 6 distinct sections:
Procession, which features the Flexatone Gamelan; Fanfares, with the
Piccolo and Bass Clarinet linked together much as a puppeteer and his
marionette; Narrative, in which the Bass Clarinet recites the 'story' of the
scene in an extravagant and flamboyant solo reminiscent of the reciter in
Japanese Bunraku; Spikefiddlers, which requires a playing technique for the
viola and later the cello that stems from Central Asian classical music;
Cradle-songs, the outer parts of which feature natural harmonics in the
viola and cello combined with bell-like 9th-partial harmonics from the
piano; and Celebration, where, in the coda, the Flutist and Clarinetist take
up Flexatones to play the closing melody.
Meanwhile was commissioned by Brigham Young University’s Barlow Endowment for Music Composition for eighth blackbird and composed in 2007. In May 2009, Stephen Hartke was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Missy Mazzoli (born Pennsylvania, 1980)
Still Life with Avalanche
(composed 2008)
According to what is likely her own description, “Missy Mazzoli is a delinquent tap dancer turned insomniac composer, whose influences range from Beethoven to Balinese Gamelan.” She studied composition with John Harbison and Charles Fussell at Boston University, earning her Bachelor of Music in 2002. That year, she traveled to the Netherlands on a Fulbright Grant, studying with Louis Andriessen at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. During 2004, she was a composer-in-residence at Amsterdam’s STEIM (Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music). In 2006, she went on to receive her Masters of Music from Yale, where she has also taught composition.
Mazzoli has been awarded a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, grants from the American Music Center and the Jerome Foundation, and ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Awards in both 2007 and 2008. She serves as the Executive Director of New York’s MATA Festival of New Music, founded by Philip Glass. In 2005, she helped found the musical/political collective Free Speech Zone Productions. In 2007, Mazzoli founded the Brooklyn-based all-female quintet Victoire, devoted to playing her works. She also plays piano in the electro-acoustic band Hills Not Skyscrapers and in the Shy Girl New Music Ensemble.
About Still Life with Avalanche, Mazzoli has written:
"Still Life With Avalanche is a pile of melodies collapsing in a chaotic free fall. The players layer bursts of sound over the static drones of harmonicas, sketching out a strange and evocative sonic landscape. I wrote this piece while in residence at Blue Mountain Center, a beautiful artist colony in upstate New York. Halfway through my stay there I received a phone call telling me my cousin had passed away very suddenly. There's a moment in this piece when you can hear that phone call, when the piece changes direction, when the shock of real life works its way into the music's joyful and exuberant exterior. This is a piece about finding beauty in chaos, and vice versa. It is dedicated to the memory (the joyful, the exuberant, and the shocking) of Andrew Rose."
Commissioned by eighth blackbird, Still Life with Avalanche was composed in 2008 and received its premiere by that ensemble at the University of Richmond on March 24, 2009.
Marc Mellits (born Baltimore, Maryland, 1966)
Spam
(composed 1995)
Even before Mark Mellits began taking piano lessons at the age of six, he had already begun composing. His formal musical studies took place at Eastman, Yale, Cornell, and Tanglewood with such composition teachers as Samuel Adler, Martin Bresnick, Jacob Druckman, Joseph Schwantner, Bernard Rands, and Christopher Rouse. In 2004, Mellits received the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award. He is also one of the founding members of the Common Sense Composers Collective and plays keyboards in his own Mellits Consort
Spam, a tribute to the canned meat product, not the electronic mail phenomenon, was composed in 1995 for flute, clarinet, violin, violoncello, and piano. Mr. Mellits has supplied the following notes on the work:
“Everything happens twice in Spam. The music constantly brings itself back, repeating ideas twice but always changing it the second time. Shifting and self-reversing instrumentation continually sets the musical material off of itself, hiding and then bringing to forefront musical ideas. With a backdrop of contrasting and deceptive instrumentations, the music itself is ironically quite direct. I am attempting to speak musically at a personal level. The most important thing I want to achieve in Spam is to communicate directly with the listener, through the musicians. We are all a team: composer, performer, and audience.”
Mellits is fond of what he has called “wacky titles,” others of which
include Paranoid Cheese, Desperate Miniature Humans, and The Misadventures
of Soup. In a 2006 interview he is quoted as having said, “I try to
choose titles that make the listener think about what it might mean. It
forces one to pay close attention to the music, and it is fun for the
audience to try to come up with the meaning behind the title. Sometimes
there is no meaning whatsoever, sometimes there is a meaning, or more often,
multiple meanings. It does not matter, because the point of these weird
titles is to come up with something bizarre enough to make the listener not
only laugh a little, but at the same time have fun searching for a meaning.”
So, have fun.
George Perle (born Bayonne, New Jersey, May 6, 1915; died New York, January 23, 2009)
Critical Moments 2
(composed 2001)
Widely honored as both a composer and a theorist, George Perle was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, May 6, 1915. He earned his B.A. at DePaul University in 1938 and his Ph.D. at New York University in 1956. Over the decades, he taught throughout the United States, from the University of Louisville (1949-1957) to UC Davis (1957-1961), from Yale (1965-1966) to UC Berkeley (1989). In 1986, he won both the Pulitzer Prize in music for his Wind Quintet no 4 and a MacArthur Fellowship. His two-volume book The Operas of Alban Berg won the American Musicological Society’s Otto Kinkeldey Award and the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award.
Although Perle was among the earliest of American composers to find inspiration in the twelve-tone music of the Second Vienna School, his works reflect what he called “twelve-note tonality.” From 1939 onward, Perle refined his system to create what amounts to a hierarchical structure based on symmetrically related pairs among the twelve notes. As Perle conceived his system in a manner analogous to the concepts of “key” or “mode” in tonal systems, the result is a sound that avoids most of the overt difficulties many contemporary listeners associate with Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern.
Composed in 2001, Perle’s Critical Moments 2 is a set of nine brief pieces commissioned by the Naumburg Foundation for eighth blackbird, who premiered the work on March 5, 2002, in New York’s Alice Tully Hall. His first Critical Moments was composed in 1996. About Critical Moments 2, Perle has written: “The instrumentation of these nine short, self-contained, and strikingly individual movements for six players corresponds to that of Pierrot Lunaire, except for the substitution of a percussion part for the quasi-spoken (Sprechstimme) vocal part of Schoenberg’s work.” Perle died in Manhattan on January 23, 2009.
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Program notes by Jay Weitz, Senior Consulting Database Specialist for music,
OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Dublin, Ohio.
He is a contributing performing arts critic for the weekly
alternative newspaper Columbus Alive
(http://www.columbusalive.com).
