Paul Lansky b. 1944
It All Adds Up

There is a unique and endearing duality to the music of Paul Lansky. One the one hand, he employs extremely sophisticated technological innovations and esoteric algorithms; while on the other he creates work that transcends technology and conveys a highly personal, accessible, and even sentimental aesthetic. Although his ingenious technical developments insure his prominence in the field of computer music, his influence in large part comes from the curiosity and humanity that inhabit his works.

He played horn during his undergraduate years at Queens College but turned his attention to computer music as a graduate student at Princeton. After completing his doctoral work and joining the faculty at Princeton Lansky become increasingly interested in using technology to examine the relationship between pure sound and its aural associations. In his numerous folk tune settings he demonstrated an uncanny ability to create nostalgia out of synthesized timbres and much of his work in the 1980's and ‘90's explored the sonic contours of speech.

It All Adds Up represents a return to writing for conventional instruments after a long and distinguished period of composing for electronics. One feels the composer arriving at a sense of rebirth in this piece. It has properties of charm and an exploratory quality that can be favorably compared to the work of jazz great Thelonius Monk.

Claude Debussy 1862-1918
En Blanc et Noir

Any discussion of French composers inevitably leads to the names Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Both were able to translate the impressionist movement in art into music that succeeded wonderfully in creating moods and painting scenes. Both drew on a number of eclectic sources for their inspiration but Debussy wasn’t as influenced by 20th century musical ideas as was the younger Ravel. His musical sources included the melodic practices of Borodin and Mussourgsky; the sounds, textures, and exotic scales of Eastern music; the clarity, precision and refinement of 18th century French composers; and the decorative arabesques of Oriental melody.

Despite writing music that often baffled his instructors at the Paris Conservatory, the young Debussy won the coveted Prix du Rome in 1884, which enabled him to study for three years at the Villa Medici. When he returned to Paris in 1887 he became immersed in the progressive cultural movement then flourishing in the French capital. All his life he had been searching for a new form of musical expression and he now began to approximate in music what was happening in poetry and art. By incorporating these avant-garde artistic ideas into his work he developed a wholly distinctive style that introduced new concepts of harmony, tonality, tone color, and form. He became, in fact, the father of impressionism in music - “the incomparable painter of mystery, silence, and the infinite, of the passing cloud, and the sunlit shimmer of the waves”.

Debussy’s last years were marred by a decline in his powers brought about by a long battle with cancer and his difficulty in coming to grips with the carnage of World War One. An extremely sensitive man and an ardent nationalist, he was, in effect, creatively paralyzed by the outbreak of hostilities and abandoned composition for almost a year. The first work he completed after this period was En Blanc et Noir, a set of three pieces for two pianos. The title aptly describes the sharp contrasts in mood and color found between the three movements and, indeed, within the movements themselves.

John Novacek b. 1964
Three Rags for Two Pianos

John Novacek is a prize-winning concert pianist of international renown. As a pianist he divides his solo work between recitals and concertos and has appeared in the world’s most important concert halls with many of music’s greatest orchestras and musicians. As an arranger he has produced work for artists as diverse as The Three Tenors, Kiri Te Kanawa, and Diana Ross. But it is as a composer that we will hear him this evening. Tonight we will have the pleasure of listening to his Three Rags for Two Pianos. Rags are a form of music that Mr. Novacek has embraced as both a performer and a writer. His work Novarags has been hailed as “a superb contribution to this literature (The Seattle Times)”. In an enthusiastic article in The Record Shelf Guide critic Jim Svejda writes, “Novacek can not only play piano rags, he can really compose them! Novarags is as entertaining an album of piano rags as have ever come down the pike”. Mr. Novacek’s work in the field contains rags for solo piano, for piano and violin, for two pianos, and for piano and guitar duo.

Alan Hovhaness 1911-2000
Mihr

Alan Hovhaness was one of the 20th century’s most prolific composers. His last work carried the phenomenal opus number of 428 - even though it is estimated that Hovhaness himself destroyed approximately one thousand of his creations. Born in Boston of Armenian and Scottish parents, he studied music at the New England Conservatory. He was always drawn to non-Western music and his maxim of “saying as much as possible with the fewest possible notes” was learned from listening to the Armenian singer Komitas. He cites his studies in the Far East and his exposure to Uday Shankar (brother of Ravi) as the source of the mysticism in his music. His style is, however, distinctly his own. He once wrote; “I’ve always listened to my own voice. I was discontented with the kind of music that everyone said I should write - all clever and dissonant, intellectualized. I wanted write music that was deeply felt, music that would move people”.

As a tribute to his unswerving vision, he was inducted into the American Academy of Fine Arts and Letters in 1977. In 1991 an eightieth birthday celebration was held at Carnegie Hall at which the composer conducted the world premiere of his Symphony # 65.

Mihr, written in 1945 is his musical depiction of an Armenian Fire God. It is a single-mindedly nationalistic piece which imitates an Armenian hammered zither. It has been described by critic Walter Simmons as one of the composer’s twenty greatest works.

George Crumb b.1929
Otherworldly Resonances

George Crumb’s reputation as a composer of hauntingly beautiful scores has made him one of the most frequently performed contemporary composers of the last fifty years. From Los Angeles to Moscow and from Scandinavia to South America festivals devoted to his music are regularly held. And this winner of a Grammy Award (2001) and a Pulitzer Prize (1968) continues to compose music that enriches the musical lives of those who hear it.

George Crumb was born in Charleston West Virginia in 1929 and began his serious studies at Charleston’s Mason College of Music from which he graduated in 1950. His formal study ended when received his DMA from the University of Michigan in 1959. He began composing while still in his teens but save for a few pieces such as Three Early Songs (1947) Sonata (1955) and Variazioni (1959) he dismisses much of the work of his youth as mere juvenilia. In the 1960's and ‘70's however he produced a series of works that immediately drew the attention and admiration of soloists and ensembles around the world. Many were vocal works based on the poetry of Federica Garcia Lorca but other major compositions include pieces for electric string quartet, electric flute, electric cello, and amplified piano. His largest score - Star Child (1977) - is written for soprano, solo trombone, children’s voices, male speaking choir, bell ringers, and large orchestra. His major work, which has continued into the new millennium, often juxtaposes contrasting styles. References range from the Western musical tradition, to hymns and folk music, and to non - Western musical traditions. His scores include programmatic, symbolic, mystical, and theatrical elements. Having retired form his teaching position at the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Crumb continues to live in the same house where he and his wife of more than fifty years raised their three children.

Mr. Crumb has written of tonight’s piece: “Otherworldly Resonances, completed in July of 2002, was composed for Susan Grace and Alice Rybak - the wonderfully gifted artists of Quattro Mani. Susan and Alice had performed all three of my earlier works involving two pianists and this new composition was intended as a kind of modest postscript to my catalog in this genre. Otherworldly Resonances is headed with the direction ‘Very slowly, with a Zen-like intensity of concentration’. The work does in fact demand extreme precision in its rhythmic and timbral nuances. All the various techniques of the extended piano, which have characterized my piano writing since my Five Pieces for Piano of 1962, are revisited here and, I hope, given fresh meaning. The germinal pitch cell of the piece is a four note theme which I call ‘ostinato mistico’ in the score and is repeated throughout the piece (being played alternately by the two pianists). Everything else in the composition - contrasting motifs, decorative figurations, chord clusters, etc. - is super-imposed on this ostinato theme”.

Frederic Rzewski b.1938
Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues

Born in Westfield Massachusetts in 1938, Frederic Rzewski has been a force in new and futuristic music in this country and abroad for almost forty years. He originally studied music at Princeton and Harvard but while in Italy in 1960 he became interested in playing and writing new piano music with an improvisatory element. He joined with musicians Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum to form Musica Elettronica Viva - a group in which improvisation and electronic instruments were featured.

Mr. Rzewski left Italy in 1971 and in 1977 he accepted a post as Professor of Composition at Liege’s Conservatoire Royale de Musique. Much in demand as an educator, he has since taught at many prestigious schools and universities in the United States and Europe. As a pianist, he has been described as “a granitically overpowering piano technician, capable of depositing huge boulders of sonoristic material across the keyboard without actually wrecking the instrument”. This description of his playing might also apply to his style of keyboard writing as well. The powerful piece we will hear tonight provides ample evidence of his intensely dramatic type of composition. It achieves its effect by extended passages of repeated chords sustained by driving rhythms. Many of his works are inspired by secular and socio-historical themes and Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues is such a one. His musical description of the mill is so evocative that one can almost hear the relentless whirring of the machinery; the sound of which is integrated with the blues melody itself.

The composer has provided the following commentary on the piece: “Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues is an arrangement for two pianos, written in 1980, of a piece for solo piano written a year earlier, the fourth of the four North American Ballads. The song on which it is based is of unknown authorship, but dates from some time in the 1880's. The (more modern) text is about working conditions in the textile mills of North Carolina, probably not too different today than they were then”:

Old man Sargent, sittin’ at his desk,
The damned old fool won’t give us a rest;
He’d take the nickels off a dead man’s eyes
To buy Coca-Cola and Eskimo pies.
(Chorus)
I’ve got the blues, I’ve got the blues,
I’ve got the Winnsboro cotton mill blues;
You know and I know, I ain’t got to tell,
You work for Tom Watson, got to work like Hell.
When I die don’t bury me at all,
Just hang me up on the spool-room wall;
Put a gaffer in my hand,
So I can spool in the Promised Land.
(Repeat chorus)

Wed.
October 29, 2008 7:30
Antares
The Indiana History Center
450 West Ohio Street

Wed.
November 19, 2008 7:30
Quattro Mani
Music for two pianos
The Indiana History Center
450 West Ohio Street

Wed.
March 11, 2009 7:30
Belcea String Quartet
The Indiana History Center
450 West Ohio Street

Wed.
April 22, 2009 7:30
Brentano String Quartet
Indianapolis Central Library
Clowes Auditorium
40 East St. Clair St

Sat.
June 6, 2009 7:30
Guarneri String Quartet
Christel DeHaan
Fine Arts Center
University of Indianapolis
1400 East Hanna Avenue