ASH FURE therefore i was (2012)
Program Note:
My grandmother had advanced Parkinson’s disease. Despite its surface manifestations, her sickness was not muscular. Her body worked, her brain worked, but the method of passing messages between the two malfunctioned. She knew how she wanted to move, but she couldn’t make her muscles move. She knew what her emotions were, but she could not grasp their cause. She lived inside a radical disassociation, a gap between intention and execution so extreme that the simplest of actions required inordinate effort. This sense of disassociation pervades Therefore I Was. You’ll see it in the limbs of the cellist as they wrench away from the ordered movements required to sound stable pitches. You’ll hear it as the players strain towards a unified breath around which to coalesce. The music repels between two aesthetic poles: one pulling the instruments towards stillness; the other anchoring their gestures to an anxious, aggressive ground. This movement mirrors the crisis I watched my grandmother endure. The life to which she fiercely clung was brutal and unforgiving. At such times the will to live can seem irrational, even inhumane. And yet, somehow, astonishing, and unabashedly human.
Therefore I Was was commissioned by the Alice and Harry Eiler Foundation on receipt of the 2010 Jezek Prize. It was premiered by Talea Ensemble on March 4th, 2012.
ASH FURE is a sonic artist who blends installation and performance. Called “purely visceral” and “staggeringly original” by The New Yorker, Fure’s full-bodied listening experiences open uncommon sites of collective encounter. Operating outside language or story, Ash shapes charged multisensory atmospheres that listeners and performers navigate together. Recent immersive productions include Hive Rise: for Subs and Megas (2020), commissioned by Club TransMediale (CTM) and premiered in Berlin’s iconic Berghain club; Filament: for Trio, Orchestra, and Moving Voices (2018), commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and premiered in New York’s Geffen Hall; and The Force of Things (2017), an installation opera, premiered at Peak Performances, that wrestles with the rising tide of climate dread inside us. Fure holds a PhD in Music Composition from Harvard University and is an Associate Professor of Music at Dartmouth College. A finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Music, Fure is the recipient of two Lincoln Center Emerging Artists Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rome Prize in Music Composition, a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Prize, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant for Artists, a Fulbright Fellowship to France, a Darmstadt Kranichsteiner Musikpreis, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship from Columbia University.
R. MURRAY SHAFER The Crown of Ariadne (1979)
Program Note:
The Crown of Ariadne was written for Canadian harpist Judy Loman, who premiered it on March 3, 1979 in Toronto. It was intended as part of Patria 5, which retells the myths of Theseus, Ariadne, and the Minotaur. Ariadne was the daughter of the King of Crete. Periodically the city of Athens was required to send a shipload of youths and maidens to be herded into the labyrinth (a maze so complex it could not be solved) as sacrifice for the Minotaur. By unwinding thread behind her, she was able to lead the group headed by Theseus (with whom she had fallen in love) out after they slew the Minotaur. She eloped with him, but he abandoned her on the Island of Naxos, where she found true love with the god Bacchus.
In this piece the harp represents Ariadne. However, the harpist also plays small percussion instruments such as ankle bells, crotales, cymbals, and wood blocks. She must also sing into the harp through a tube, slide the tuning key up and down the strings, and produce percussive techniques. The tape comes in during the closing “Labyrinth Dance.” It consists of a pre-recorded harp part, on a harp tuned to a different system than the “live” one. This creates a complex, “labyrinthine” sonic texture. Crown of Ariadne is in the form of a six-movement suite, twenty minutes long. It also makes up a portion of Patria 3: The Greatest Show, where it accompanies a Javanese-style shadow puppet play.
Source: https://penarthmusiccentre.com/product/r-murray-schafer-the-crown-of-ariadne-for-harp-percussion/
Born in Sarnia, Ontario, R. MURRAY SHAFER (1933-2021) won national and international acclaim not only for his achievement as a composer but also as an educator, environmentalist, literary scholar, visual artist and provocateur. After receiving a Licentiate in piano through the Royal Schools of Music (England) in 1952, he pursued further studies at the Royal Conservatory of Music and the University of Toronto, followed by periods of autodidactic study in Austria and England which encompassed literature, philosophy, music and journalism. A prolific composer, he wrote works ranging from orchestral compositions to choral music as well as musical theatre and multi-media ritual.
His diversity of interests is reflected by the enormous range and depth of such works as Loving (1965), Lustro (1972), Music for Wilderness Lake (1979), Flute Concerto (1984), and the World Soundscape Project, as well as his 12-part Patria music theatre cycle. His most important book, The Tuning of the World (1977), documents the findings of his World Soundscape Project, which united the social, scientific and artistic aspects of sound and introduced the concept of acoustic ecology. The concept of soundscape unifies most of his musical and dramatic work, as well as his educational and cultural theories.
His other major books include E.T.A. Hoffmann and Music (1975), Ezra Pound and his Music (1977), On Canadian Music (1984), Voices of Tyranny: Temples of Silence (1993), and The Thinking Ear: On Music Education (1986). He has received commissions from numerous organizations as well as several prizes. He was the first winner of the Glenn Gould Prize for Music and Communication as well as the Molson Award for distinctive service to the arts. In 2005 he was awarded the Walter Carsen Prize, by the Canada Council for the Arts, one of the top honors for lifetime achievement by a Canadian artist.
Adapted from: https://www.philmultic.com/composers/schafer.html
GIACINTO SCELSI Ko-Lho for flute and clarinet (1966)
Compared to Scelsi’s Suite for flute and clarinet (1953), KoLho seems to come from an entirely different imaginative world. In the 13 years that separate the two works, Scelsi went from a playful mode in which the two instruments are essentially staged like characters to a virtual blending of the two into a single entity. Scelsi developed this new approach to ensemble writing from the late ’50s onward. The style is perhaps bestheard in his string quartets from the third onward, but the modestly sized KoLho compares well with those pieces, which are among the most important of the last century. He tightly winds the parts together, usually keeping them within the range of a semitone or smaller, and both usually speak in monotone longtones, actively punctuated with rearticulations and spatially modeled with color shifts. The instruments blend into a single, flowing, ecstatic ribbon of red noise. The articulations cause brief ripples in the surface illusion, but the perceived unity of the sounds is so strong that it’s easier to believe that the sound is flowing from a single instrument than from a duo. It’s those decorative, poetic nuancings of the sound that are the true life of the piece, the focus of the listener’s interest, guided by Scelsi’s intuitive inner rhythm. Quartertone glissandi, quartertones, stunning multiphonics on the clarinet, and detailed demands on the specifics of technique, such as the width of the vibrato and subtle, dynamic crosshatchings, obsessively turn the timbres over and over in constant change as objects of contemplation. Scelsi was a composer keenly aware that a new work must be its own frame, that on a certain level even the most stylistically extreme art must contextualize and explicate itself. To that end, he occasionally completely severs the cohesion of the duo with melodic passages for either instrument. What’s extraordinary is that even these radical digressions still come off as disturbances, diversions from the main flow. Donato Mancini source:http://www.allmusic.
GIACINTO SCELSI (1905 -1988) started making his way into the art, music and literary world during the 1920s – as he frequently travelled abroad – establishing friendships that would lead him into the most important international cultural movements of the time.
During the Thirties he became interested in compositional languages and techniques such as twelve-tone serialism and the musical theories of Skrjabin and Steiner. In 1930 he penned the final touches to Rotativa (Paris, Salle Pleyel 1931 under the direction of Pierre Monteux), a composition for orchestra that would usher his name onto the international musical scene.
He found refuge in Switzerland during II Word War, where he presented String Trio (1942) and various other piano works. These are troubled years for Scelsi and here he cultivates a deep interest for poetry, visual arts, Oriental mysticism and esotericism. His active acceptance of Oriental philosophies, Zen doctrines, Yoga and the subconscious mind date back to this moment of great instability and rediscovery that clearly shines through his musical experimentation of the time.
Afterwards, Scelsi moved to Rome (where he lived until his death, which occurred on August 8 1988) where he completed a few previously unfinished works: the String Quartet and La Nascita del Verbo (both performed in Paris in 1949). His most significant compositions are characterized by the instrumentation of figures determined at random, improvising and applying new uses to traditional instruments, the introduction of the ondiola (the first electronic instrument able to produce quarter and eighth tone notes) but above all, what stands out is his unconditioned way of improvising, as if wrapped in a mist of Zen-like emptiness.
Scelsi’s compositional method was quite unique: he would record his improvisations on a magnetic tape, subsequently entrusting the transcription to collaborators that would then work under his guidance.
The score would then be completed with detailed instructions on its interpretation and measures in order to obtain the specific sound so meticulously researched by Scelsi (dampers especially designed for the strings section, stringed instruments played like percussions, sound filters to distort the sound of the wind instruments, pre-existent recordings used to lead the performance).
His orchestration methods can also be regarded as highly original: he would pair similar instruments making sure that they were out-of-phase with each other by a quarter note, thus obtaining unexpected beat effects.
This new, important phase first saw the light with the live performance of his orchestra piece Quattro pezzi su una nota sola (1959). During this same time, Scelsi published his first theoretic and literary works. His impressive musical production was first released in the 1980s by Parisian publishing house Éditions Salabert.
JÉRÉMY JOLLEY (contro-)clessidra III, IV for cello and percussion, & for piano and electronics (2023) – World Premiere
The series of pieces titled (contro-)clessidra refers to (reverse-)hourglass in Italian; an hourglass in which the material (sand or liquid) falling down to represent the time passing, moves in reverse, down to up, against gravity and our expectation of the uni-directionality of time. This image captures the central relationship between the duet members of these pieces; a contrary motion of two structures in time, resulting in a third non-directional, meditative temporality. While each piece’s expression ranges from tumultuous to peaceful, the relationship between each duet member follows contrary trajectories, and yet are in conversation.
Through these pieces, I wanted to explore and elaborate on an intuition, one I later found echoed in diverse writings from Edouard Glissant to various buddhist literature, an experience without a center, but a relation. Focusing on the qualities of relation, between the intra- and extra-personal experience, the individual and (the lack of) community, these pieces became transformations of one another, interrelated, complementary, and empathetic, as well as single-minded, insular, and, at time, antagonistic. They can be performed (experienced) alone, simultaneously, and also dove-tail one into another in a single movement work .
French-American composer JEREMY JOLLEY was born in Lyon, France, and grew up in the French Alps where he played guitar in rock and fusion bands. He moved to Seattle in 1997 and pursued composition studies and received his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Music degrees in Composition from the University of Washington. During these years, he studied composition primarily with Joël-François Durand, electronic music with Juan Pampin, and classical guitar with Steven Novacek. Jeremy has been awarded the Brechemin Scholarship in Music, the William Bergsma Endowment for Excellence in Music Composition, a residency in the 2008 Jack Straw Artist Support Program for his work in the improvisation and experimental ensemble, Unused Lexical Variable. His music has been played by celebrated contemporary music performers such as the Dutch pianist and ensemble ASKO|SHOENBERG member René Eckhart, cellist Séverine Ballon, violinist Graeme Jennings, and clarinetist Carol Robinson. He attended the master classes of Brian Ferneyhough, Chaya Czernowin, Pierluigi Billone, and Mark André at the Darmstadt Internationalen Ferienkurse. Since 2010, he is the co-Artistic Director of the new music ensemble, Seattle Modern Orchestra. Since 2017, he is Associate Director of Artistic Collaborations at the Seattle Symphony leading numerous community centered initiative including community composition projects with Derek Bermel, Alexander Gardner, Charles Corey, Janice Giteck, Swil Kanim, and Paul Chiyokten Wagner.