Composer Iannis Xenakis

Iannis Xenakis is one of the leaders of modernism in music, a hugely influential composer, particularly in the later 1950s and 1960s, when he was experimenting with compositional techniques that soon entered the basic vocabulary of the twentieth-century avant garde.

Xenakis was born, not in Greece, but in Braïla, Romania, of Greek parents, on 29 May 1922. His initial training, in Athens, was as a civil engineer. In 1947, after three years spent fighting in the Greek resistance against the Nazi occupation, during which time he was very badly injured (losing the sight of an eye), he escaped a death sentence and fled to France, where he settled and subsequently became an important element of cultural life.

Xenakis was first active as an architect, collaborating with Le Corbusier on a number of projects, not least the Philips Pavilion, designed by Xenakis, at the 1958 Brussels World Fair. It was in the 1950s, too, that Xenakis’ compositions began to be published. In 1952 he attended composition classes with Olivier Messaien, who suggested that Xenakis apply his scientific training to music.

The resulting style, based on procedures derived from mathematics, architectural principles and game theory, catapulted Xenakis to the front ranks of the avant garde – although there was never any suggestion that he was a member of a clique or group: he was always his own man. He never, for example, embraced total serialism, and he also avoided more traditional devices of harmony and counterpoint; instead, he developed other ways of organising the dense masses of sound that are characteristic of his first compositions. These stochastic, or random, procedures were based on mathematical principles and were later entrusted to computers for their realisation.

But for all the formal control in their composition, Xenakis’ scores retain an elemental energy, a life-force that gives the music an impact of visceral effectiveness: works like Bohor for electronics (1962), Eonta for piano and brass quintet (1963-64), Persephassa for six percussionists, placed around the audience (1969), and the ballet Kraanerg, for 23 instrumentalists and tape (1969) all exhibit a primitive power that belies the complexity of their origins. The Sydney Morning Herald said of Kraanerg, for example, that it “remains staggeringly powerful and clamorous, an essay in constantly renewed energy that shows not the least sign of faltering”. Married with this primordial power is the composer’s fascination with ritualism, most often that of ancient Greece, finding fullest theatrical form in his setting of the Oresteia (1966).

Iannis Xenakis is published by Boosey & Hawkes.
Reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes

Composer Charles Wuorinen

Charles Wuorinen (b. 1938, New York) is one of the world’s leading composers.  His many honors include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the Pulitzer Prize (the youngest composer to receive the award).  His compositions encompass every form and medium, including works for orchestra, chamber ensemble, soloists, ballet, and stage.  Wuorinen has written more than 250 compositions to date.  His newest works include Time Regained, a fantasy for piano and orchestra for Peter Serkin, James Levine and the MET Opera Orchestra, Second Piano Quintet for Peter Serkin and the Brentano Quartet, Eighth Symphony for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Fourth Piano Sonata for Anne- Marie McDermott and Synaxis for four soloists, strings and timpani. Upcoming projects include an opera on Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain. (Wuorinen’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories based on the novel of Salman Rushdie was premiered by the New York City Opera in Fall 2004.)

Wuorinen has been described as a “maximalist,” writing music luxuriant with events, lyrical and expressive, strikingly dramatic.  His works are characterized by powerful harmonies and elegant craftsmanship, offering at once a link to the music of the past and a vision of a rich musical future.

Both as composer and performer (conductor and pianist) Wuorinen has worked with some of the finest performers of the current time and his works reflect the great virtuosity of his collaborators.

His works have been recorded on nearly a dozen labels including several releases on Naxos, Albany Records (Charles Wuorinen Series), John Zorn’s Tzadik label, and a CD of piano works performed by Alan Feinberg on the German label Col Legno.

Wuorinen is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

For further information please contact:

Howard Stokar Management
870 West End Avenue
New York, New York, 10025-4948
(212) 866-5798 [telephone]
(212) 662-0804 [fax]
hstokar@stokar.com
www.stokar.com

Composer Tamar Diesendruck

Tamar Diesendruck’s favored compositional medium is virtuosic chamber music, although she has also composed solo, orchestral and vocal works. Her music is often characterized as having a very wide range of expression. Works include experimental pieces like “8 —> ∞” for eight cellos (eight tends toward infinity), and unusually slow, stark music like “the grief that does not speak”. Prof. Diesendruck’s work has been performed throughout the U.S., and in Europe, by an array of excellent performers including the Pro Arte Quartet, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Lions Gate Trio, Speculum Musicae, New Millenium Ensemble, Dinosaur Annex, Phantom Arts Ensemble, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, New Century Players, League of Composers-ISCM, Earplay, Musica D’Oggi, Composers, Inc., Parnassus, Washington Square Contemporary Music, Prism Players, Music on the Edge, San Francisco Chamber Singers, Pittsburgh Youth Symphony Orchestra, Cabrini Quartet, pipa virtuoso Wu Man, avant garde violinist Carla Kihlstedt, pianist Donald Berman, and numerous other groups and soloists.

Prof. Diesendruck earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in Composition from the University of California, Berkeley and a B.A. from Brandeis University. Her work has been supported with a series of grants, fellowships, commissions and residencies, most notably a Guggenheim Fellowship, Bunting Fellowship awarded by the Radcliffe Institute, Rome Prize awarded by the American Academy in Rome, Koussevitzky Foundation Commissions, Fromm Foundation Commission, Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship, the Academy Award, Goddard Lieberson Fellowship, and Ives Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Copland Fund Recording Grants, several grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and numerous residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Bellagio (Rockefeller Foundation), Yaddo, and the Djerassi Foundation. Currently she is on the Composition faculty at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles, having previously taught at the New England Conservatory, Berklee College of Music, and University of Pittsburgh.

Composer Conlon Nancarrow

Conlon Nancarrow (born October 27, 1912 – August 10, 1997) was a U.S.-born composer who lived and worked in Mexico for most of his life. He became a Mexican citizen in 1955.

Nancarrow was born in Texarkana, Arkansas. He played trumpet in a jazz band in his youth, before studying music first in Cincinnati, Ohio and later in Boston, Massachusetts with Roger Sessions, Walter Piston and Nicolas Slonimsky. He met Arnold Schoenberg during that composer’s brief stay in Boston in 1933.

In Boston, Nancarrow joined the Communist Party. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, he traveled to Spain to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in fighting against Francisco Franco. Upon his return to the United States in 1939, he learned that his Brigade colleagues were having trouble getting their U.S. passports renewed because of their Communist Party membership. After spending time in New York City in 1940, Nancarrow moved to Mexico to escape the harassment visited upon former Communist Party members.

Upon his first subsequent return to the U.S., in 1981 (for the New Music America festival in San Francisco), he consulted a lawyer about the possibility of returning to his native country, since the pollution in Mexico City was worsening his emphysema. He was told that he would have to sign a statement swearing that he had been “young and foolish” when he embraced communism, which he refused to do. Consequently, he continued living in Las Águilas, Mexico City, until his death at age 84. Though he had a few friends among Mexican composers, he was largely ignored by the Mexican musical establishment during most of his lifetime.

Nevertheless, it was in Mexico that Nancarrow did the work he is best known for today. He had already written some music in the United States, but the extreme technical demands they made on players meant that satisfactory performances were very rare. That situation did not improve in Mexico’s musical environment, also with few musicians available who could perform his works, so the need to find an alternative way of having his pieces performed became even more pressing. Taking a suggestion from Henry Cowell’s book New Musical Resources, which he bought in New York in 1939, Nancarrow found the answer in the player piano, with its ability to produce extremely complex rhythmic patterns at a speed far beyond the abilities of humans.

Cowell had suggested that just as there is a scale of pitch frequencies, there might also be a scale of tempi. Nancarrow undertook to create music which would superimpose tempi in cogent pieces, and by his twenty-first composition for player piano, had begun “sliding” (increasing and decreasing) tempi within strata. (see: William Duckworth, Talking Music.) Nancarrow later said that if electronic resources had been available to him at this time, he would have probably written music for them, but they were not.

Temporarily buoyed by an inheritance, Nancarrow traveled to New York City in 1947, bought a custom built, manual punching-machine to enable him to punch the piano rolls. The machine was an adaptation of one used in the commercial production of rolls, and using it was very hard work, and very slow. He also adapted the player pianos, increasing their dynamic range by tinkering with their mechanism, and covering the hammers with leather (in one player piano) and metal (in the other) so as to produce a more percussive sound. On this trip to New York he also met Cowell, and heard a performance of John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano (also a result of Cowell’s esthetics), which would later lead to Nancarrow modestly experimenting with prepared piano in his Study #30.

Nancarrow’s first pieces combined the harmonic language and melodic motifs of early jazz pianists like Art Tatum with extraordinarily complicated metrical schemes. The first five rolls he made are called the Boogie-Woogie Suite (later assigned the name Study No. 3 a-e) and are probably the most jazzy of all his works. Later works tend to be more abstract, with no obvious references to any music apart from Nancarrow’s.

Many of these later pieces (which he generally called studies) are canons in augmentation or diminution or prolation canons. While most canons using this device, such as those by Johann Sebastian Bach, have the tempos of the various parts in quite simple ratios, like 2:1, Nancarrow’s canons are in far more complicated ratios. The Study No. 40, for example, has its parts in the ratio e:pi, while the Study No. 37 has twelve individual melodic lines, each one moving at a different tempo.

His music has a mathematical beauty and elegance that happily coexists with musical expressiveness and a puckish sense of humor. Nancarrow did not see a clear delineation between the two approaches and he never worried about it. This natural, organic “double-esthetic” is one of his most relevant contributions to 20th century music. Another important contribution relates to a kind of “semiological extrapolation“. On the one hand, his music can be heard as “symbols”, with their often-recognized analogical correspondences (”Blues”, “Jazz”, “Flamenco”, etc). There is, also, an “abstract, decodified profile” (the complex poly-temporal structures, for instance) which may be present in the same piece. This fact does break the statement “something is more different when its similarity decreases” generally used in semiology…

Having spent many years in obscurity, Nancarrow benefitted from the 1969 release of an entire album of his work by Columbia Records as part of a brief flirtation of the label’s classical division with modern avant garde music.

In 1982 he received a MacArthur Award which paid him $300,000 over 5 years. This increased interest in his work prompted him to write for conventional instruments, and he composed several works for small ensembles.

Still more recently, Nancarrow’s entire output for player piano has been recorded and released on the German Wergo label. Some of his Studies for Player Piano have also been arranged for musicians to play. In 1995, composer and critic Kyle Gann published a full-length study of Nancarrow’s output, The Music of Conlon Nancarrow (Cambridge University Press, 1995, 303 pp.). Jürgen Hocker, another Nancarrow specialist, published Begegnungen mit Nancarrow (neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Schott Musik International, Mainz 2002, 284 pp.)

The complete contents of Nancarrow’s studio, including the player piano rolls, the instruments, the libraries, and other documents and objects, are now in the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel. The Germans Jurgen Hocker and Wolfgang Heisig are the current live-performers of Nancarrow’s rolls using similar acoustical instruments. Other performers of his works (often in arrangement for live musicians) include Thomas Ades, Alarm Will Sound and ensemble Calefax from the Netherlands who also recorded the Studies for player piano, already called ‘Best CD of 2009′ by Dutch newspaper Het Parool, only to be beaten by a eventual recording of the mysterious Judas-Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach, which nobody new existed.’

May 18 Monday 1pm
Knuth Hall Creative Arts Building
Admission: FREE

May 19 Tuesday 8pm
Berkeley Chamber Performances
Berkeley City Club
2315 Durant Avenue, Berkeley
Admission: $20 General

The relationship between numbers and music has long inspired many composers, from Bach to Wuorinen. ADORNO presents music imbued with the spirit of ratios, puzzles, fractal geometry, and other mathematic theory.

Nancarrow is best remembered for the pieces he wrote for the player piano. He was one of the first composers to use musical instruments as mechanical machines, making them play far beyond human performance ability. His music has a mathematical beauty and elegance that happily coexists with musical expressiveness and a puckish sense of humor. ADORNO features a transcription of one of his “player piano” works for ensemble. Charles Wuorinen’s work Eleven Short Pieces, uses exactly 101 notes and Tamar Diesendruck’s work is inspired by Sudoku puzzles. Iannis Xenakis’s algorithmic work, Morsima-Amorsima, was created with the use of a complex computer program for acoustical instruments.

PROGRAM:

Tamar Diesendruck Sudoku Variations for solo piano
Iannis Xenakis Morsima-Amorsima for violin, cello, bass and piano
Charles Wuorinen Eleven Short Pieces for Violin and Vibraphone
Charles Wuorinen Spinoff for violin, bass, and congas
Iannis Xenakis Rebonds for solo percussion
Conlon Nancarrow - Player Piano No. 34 arranged for String Trio

Program curated by Bill Everett
Note: May 18th concert is an abbreviated concert of the above program.

As part of our residency at SF State, ADORNO will perform selected works by SF State students.

Program:

TBA