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2004-05
Season Preview
Carnegie Hall
Concerts focus on Innovation, Emerging Composers
& World Premieres
American
Composers Orchestra announces updates to its 2004-05 season, which
marks the orchestra's 28th year as a catalyst for musical innovation.
ACO's season sharpens its focus on the cutting-edge, with no less
than eight world premieres by an eclectic mix of contemporary
composers. The season expands on the orchestra's provocative Orchestra
Underground series at Zankel Hall, which launched to a sold-out
audience last season, while reducing the number of concerts
programmed in Isaac Stern Auditorium.
Music
director Steven Sloane commences his third year with the orchestra in
a season that offers new works by downtown composers Randall Woolf
and Eve Beglarian, technology-enabled premieres by Jason Freeman and
Dan Trueman, new pieces from award-winning emerging composers Manly
Romero and Carlos Carrillo, and the first major symphonic work by
Hollywood composer Danny Elfman. Featured soloists are legendary
rocker Andy Summers of the band the Police in a new concerto for two
guitars by Ingram Marshall, and Ida Kavafian, in the New York
premiere of Michael Daugherty's violin concerto, Fire and Blood.
The season opens Wednesday, November 17, 2004 in Zankel Hall with a
multimedia program exploring music and the visual arts.
New
Developments & Revised Schedule
The
2004-05 season refocuses ACO's programs and resources on new
cutting-edge work and a smaller more flexible orchestral ensemble,
with two performances in the new state-of-the-art Zankel Hall at
Carnegie Hall. Changes to ACO programs since the season was first
announced include: reworking of ACO's programming to make room for
the additional commissions and premieres; a change in venue from
Stern Auditorium to Zankel Hall for the November 17, 2004 concert;
and the cancellation of one concert (March 23, 2005).
"ACO's new season represents a significant shift in the orchestra's energies," says executive director Michael Geller. Acknowledging that budgetary challenges were a component in the decision to revise the season schedule, Geller adds, "with limited resources ACO's board and artistic leadership agreed that we needed to place an emphasis on innovative work and on composers writing today. These are the areas in which ACO has unique expertise and can have the most impact. Much of our rethinking arises out of a recent strategic planning process that has helped us prioritize in a difficult economic climate. It has been a challenging and sometimes difficult process, but an important one, and I am glad that Carnegie Hall agreed to accommodate our requests."
A major component of ACO's new emphasis is on Orchestra Underground, its brash alternative orchestra forum at Zankel Hall. ACO launched Orchestra Underground last season with premieres by New York composers Lisa Bielawa and Michael Gordon with multimedia provided by Ridge Theatre. That concert created a major stir among the New York new music community and quickly sold out. "Orchestra Underground challenges conventional notions about symphonic music and the concert experience, embracing multidisciplinary and collaborative work, novel instrumental and spatial orientations of musicians, new technologies and multimedia," says ACO artistic director Robert Beaser. "Our goal is to develop new repertoire, examine the possibilities for new growth and alternatives in our definition of the orchestra, and to provide a fertile working-ground for artists who have not traditionally had access to the orchestral ensemble," he continues.
Orchestra Underground: November 17, 2004
Wednesday, November 17, 2004 at 7:30pm in Zankel Hall is ACO's season opener, an eclectic palate of works related to each other through a connection to painting and the visual arts, with music by Tan Dun, Michael Daugherty, Randall Woolf, Morton Feldman and Stephen Sondheim. Violinist Ida Kavafian is soloist.
Randall Woolf's Women at an Exhibition will make its world premiere in a new version for chamber orchestra, electronics and video. The video for the work is by Mary Harron and John C. Walsh, filmmakers whose most famous effort is the cult classic American Psycho. The music is based on a collaborative work Woolf, Herron and Walsh just completed for the Akron Symphony Orchestra and Akron Art Museum that premiered in March. Incorporating a rhythm track and sampled voices and pop, gospel, country and new wave rock, the piece is based on some 20 works of art from the museum that depict women. Taken together, music and video form "a collection of thoughts, feelings and associations about women";how they are seen by men, by society, by each other, and how the see themselves." Woolf is a composer who is happiest when traversing extreme musical worlds, from concert music to the theatrical, to electronica, pop and alternate rock. His music has been performed by ACO, Seattle Symphony, the Paul Dresher Ensemble, Kansas City Symphony, and Bang On A Can.
Michael Daugherty's Fire and Blood, in its New York premiere, is a decidedly new take on the traditional concerto component of an orchestra concert, with the dynamic Kavafian in the solo role. Daugherty is a composer famous for finding inspiration in the landscape of America's highways and cities. He calls Fire and Blood, "my own musical fresco for violin and orchestra." The music was inspired by the Diego Rivera's "Detroit Industry" murals commissioned by Edsel Ford for the Detroit Institute of Arts. Rivera himself understood the musical implications of his murals, after a tour of Ford's factory: "In my ears, I heard the wonderful symphony which came from his factories where metals were shaped into tools for men's service. It was new music, waiting for the composer to give it communicable form."
Ida Kavafian's vast repertoire and impressive versatility have gained her a unique position in the music world. Her commitment to contemporary music has led to many world premieres by composers as varied as Toru Takemitsu, who wrote a concerto for her, jazz greats Chick Corea and Wynton Marsalis, with whom she has toured and recorded, and Michael Daugherty, whose Fire and Blood she premiered last season. For nineteen years, she has been the artistic director of the highly regarded festival Music from Angel Fire. She also founded and guided Bravo! Colorado in Vail as music director for ten years, and was a recipient of the coveted Avery Fisher Career Grant in 1988.
Also on the program is "Self Portrait," the all-strings movement from Tan Dun's Death and Fire: Dialogue with Paul Klee, and De Kooning by the iconoclastic avant-garde composer Morton Feldman, whose work was greatly influenced by the New York school of abstract expressionist painters. Feldman felt a special affinity for De Kooning, whose work looked spontaneous, but whose working pace was extremely slow.
Completing the program is a set of songs from "Sunday in the Park with George," the Pulitzer Prize-winning show based on the work of Georges Seurat, by Stephen Sondheim--a composer whose sophisticated musical conceptions argue strongly for inclusion in a concert program that looks anew at the orchestral enterprise.
Orchestra Underground: January 21, 2005
ACO returns to Zankel Hall on Friday, January 21, 2005 at 7:30pm, for a program of world premieres by younger American composers, each with a distinctive and experimental flair. The composers represented include Carlos Carrillo, Jason Freeman, Dan Trueman and Eve Beglarian.
Jason Freeman's Glimmer will break down the traditional divisions between composer, performers, and audience by giving the audience a role in shaping performance of the piece. Each audience member will be provided with a glow stick with which they can signal their suggestions for the piece, according to instructions provided to each audience member. Digital camcorders will capture on/off activity of these objects from individuals as well as audience groups, then forward this data to a computer which in turn sends performance instructions to orchestra members based on this input. Freeman is a composer and media artist who combines mathematical structures, musical intuition, and the excitement of live performance into works that challenge audiences to approach music and sound in new ways, and which often blur the boundaries between art and technology and between composer, performer, and listener. His recent media works have exploited cutting-edge technologies and complex structural models to create meaningful interactive experiences.
Dan Trueman's Traps II is scored for strings and electric violin plus laptop computer, with the composer serving as soloist. Dispersed throughout the ensemble are a series of unique hemispherical speakers that interweave a textural fabric between the strings and electronics. The piece extends work Trueman commenced in March 2003, at the outset of the war in Iraq, exploring the malleability of memory. In the piece, the computer remembers notes played by the soloist at various times in the past, then "traps" them and transposes their pitches to another previously played pitch. Trueman is a composer, improviser, new instrument creator and software designer. He has performed at both contemporary and folk music festivals, including Bang On A Can. His electronic improvisation ensemble, Interface, has recorded with Pauline Oliveros on the Deep Listening label. Trueman has written for his own ensembles, as well as the Brentano, Daedalus, Cassatt and Amernet string quartets, Non Sequitur, and others. He recently completed commissions from American Composers Forum and the Society for New Music. With degrees in physics, composition and theory, he has taught composition at Columbia, Colgate, and since 2002 at Princeton.
Both Trueman and Freeman's new works are part of Orchestra Tech, ACO's long-term initiative to commission, develop and perform new works that integrate digital technologies and the orchestra.
Carlos Carrillo is writing a new work for this concert, the second such work commissioned for ACO by the BMI Foundation, Inc./Carlos Surinach Fund. Carrillo is at the forefront of a young generation of composers from Puerto Rico who integrate their island roots with advanced techniques. He studied at Eastman School of Music and Yale, and earned his Ph. D. from the University of Pennsylvania. His teachers include Tania León, Joseph Schwantner, Christopher Rouse, Jacob Druckman, Martin Bresnick, Roberto Sierra, George Crumb, James Primosch, Jay Reise and Steve Mackey. Carrillo's music has been performed by ACO as part of its Sonidos de las Américas Festival, as well the Casals Festival, Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra, and members of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. In 2002, his Cantares was featured at the inaugural "Synergy: Composer and Conductor" program presented by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and American Symphony Orchestra League. In 1998 he received one of the first Aaron Copland Awards from the Copland Heritage Association and he was the 2001-2002 Van Lier Emerging Composer Fellow with ACO. In September 2004 he joins the faculty of Indiana's DePauw University.
Eve Beglarian is a composer, performer, and audio producer whose chamber and orchestral music has been commissioned and performed by the Bang On A Can All-Stars, the California EAR Unit, Relâche, the Paul Dresher Ensemble, Orchestra X, Sequitur, Dinosaur Annex, and the New York Festival of Song. Her experience in music theater includes twisted tutu, a performance project with Kathleen Supové; Forgiveness, a collaboration with Chen Shi-Zheng; and Noh master Akira Matsui. Current projects include an opera based on Stephen King's "The Man in the Black Suit" and a song cycle/concept CD with boombox virtuoso and composer Phil Kline. Beglarian's FlamingO divides the orchestra into three simultaneous bands: the "wolf chaser" band, named after the whirling Inuit instrument; the "flamingo" band, playing with sampled flamingo honks; and the "metalastic" band, playing canonically inflected music, taking an unidentified bird sample as a departure point. Each band takes a solo, and when they are all playing together things are a complicated cacophony, depending on what the listener chooses to focus on.
ACO at Carnegie Hall: February 23, 2005
On Wednesday, February 23, 2005 at 8:00pm, ACO moves upstairs to Stern Auditorium for another program of all world premieres: in this case, new pieces by emerging composer Manly Romero, the noted film composer Danny Elfman, and a concerto for electric and acoustic guitar by transplanted west-coast composer Ingram Marshall. Marshall's piece is being written for classical guitarist Benjamin Verdery and electric guitarist Andy Summers.
Opening the program is Symphony: roja claro azul by Manly Romero, a young composer who first came to ACO's attention as a participant in the orchestra's annual New Music Readings, which seek out talented young composers from around the country. That experience led ACO to commission Romero in 2002. Mr. Romero's compositions are predominantly concerned with spirituality, self-knowledge, and with his paternal roots in Mexico and Spain. His recent orchestral work Merengue, which earned Romero a place at ACO's readings, incorporates rhythmic constructs and melodic idioms from Latin American song forms, while retaining a fully developed harmonic language. Mr. Romero is currently pursuing doctoral studies at the University of Michigan. He has served as an associate artist with the San Francisco Symphony's "Adventures in Music" and "Concerts for Kids" programs, and has received numerous awards and commissions, including those from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Meet the Composer, and the American Music Center. Romero's one-act, Lewis Carroll-based opera Dreaming of Wonderland was presented as part of New York City Opera's Showcasing American Composers series in 2001.
In writing his new concerto for electric and classical guitars, Ingram Marshall recognized "the mismatch from the start." "The electric guitar will have its brashness and rudeness, and wits wailing, singing flights; the classical will have its gentleness, its mellow sweetness, and its insouciance. They will trade roles at times and end up in some kind of harmony. The orchestra will provide a kind of landscape on which this concerted encounter will take place," says the composer.
Currently living in Connecticut, composer Ingram Marshall has lived and worked extensively in the San Francisco Bay Area. Educated at Lake Forest College, Columbia University, where he worked with Vladimir Ussachevsky, and California Institute of the Arts, where he worked with Morton Subotnick. Marshall went on to study gamelan music in Bali and Java in 1971. Marshall has performed his own live electronic music in the U.S. and Europe. He has been the recipient of awards, grants and commissions from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fromm Foundation, California Arts Council, the Washington State Arts Commission and others. ACO commissioned, performed and recorded Marshall's Kingdom Come, a work that The New York Times called "some of the most stirring spiritual art to be found in America today."
Andy Summers is the guitarist from the rock band the Police, a leading rock band of the late 1970s and early 80s, and one of the most significant groups of all time. Starting out as early punk rock pioneers, the Police, which Summers formed with Stewart Copeland and Sting, grew considerably more adventurous, experimenting with jazz and various world musics. Since the disbanding of the Police, Summers has furthered his work as a highly creative and experimental recording artist. He has recorded thirteen solo albums which include outings with the Kronos Quartet, CDs devoted entirely to the music of Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus, performances with classical guitarist Manuel Barrueco, and two albums of Brazilian music with the guitar virtuoso Victor Biglione.
Benjamin Verdery has an exciting and varied musical life as a guitarist and composer. Several composers have written music for him, including Daniel Asia, John Anthony Lennon, Ingram Marshall, Anthony Newman, Roberto Sierra, Van Stiefel and Jack Vees. A prolific composer, he has turned his attention to crafting unique extended works for large guitar ensembles. His Pick and Roll was premiered in 2000 at the UC Santa Cruz Contemporary Festival, written for multiple guitars, saxophone, violin and basketball player. Mr. Verdery has chaired the guitar department at the Yale University School of Music since 1985.
For the second half of the concert, Danny Elfman is writing his first major work for the concert hall, a 30-minute, as yet untitled, symphonic tour-de-force. Elfman is one of Hollywood's most eccentric self-styled composers, whose work has ranged from the frenetic theme from the TV show "The Simpsons" to such diverse Hollywood classics as "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure," "Batman," and "The Nightmare Before Christmas". Elfman first came to prominence in 1980 after scoring the film "Forbidden Zone" for his band The Mystic Knights of Oingo Boingo. Oingo Boingo blossomed into a permanent group with a large cult following.
ACO music director Steven Sloane says, "America's greatest musical influence around the globe has been through the work of Hollywood composers. That was true during Hollywood's golden age and it remains so today. In the early 21st century, with the great breakdown of the walls that divide the musical landscape, it makes sense for us to do what we can to encourage film composers to stretch themselves musically, just as we do for all the composers we commission. I can think of nobody with a fresher musical imagination than Danny Elfman. I don't know what to expect, and I can't wait!" Sloane concludes.
New Music Readings: May 5 & 6, 2005
In what has become a right-of-passage for the aspiring orchestral composer, ACO holds its 14th annual New Music Readings Thursday amd Friday, May 5 and 6, 2005 at Columbia University. Up to eight composers from throughout the United States will be selected to receive a reading of a new work. Each participating composer receives a rehearsal, reading and a digital recording of his or her work. Review and feedback sessions with ACO principal players, mentor-composers and guest conductors provide crucial artistic, technical and conceptual assistance. Following the Readings, one composer will be awarded a $15,000 commission for a performance by ACO, providing an all-important, career-building Carnegie Hall debut.
The reading sessions are made possible with a leadership grant from Paul Underwood, and the proceedings are open to the public free of charge. ACO's artistic director, composer Robert Beaser, directs the readings, and music director Steven Sloane and assistant conductor Jeffrey Milarsky share the podium duties. [More about the new Music Readings.]
Steven
Sloane, Music Director
Steven Sloane is one of the most adventurous conductors to have emerged in recent years. Through his work across Europe and in America, Mr. Sloane has won acclaim for his compelling programming, theatrical flair, and impressive technique. His passion for unusual repertoire, interest in eclectic juxtapositions of music of divergent eras and styles, commitment to contemporary works, and willingness to challenge convention have established Mr. Sloane as a bold champion of the future of concert music. [find out more]
Ticket Info
Tickets for ACO's concert in Stern Auditorium are $25 and $42. Tickets for ACO's Zankel Hall performances are $20 and $32. All tickets may be purchased through CarnegieCharge at 212-247-7800, by visiting Carnegie Hall's website at www.carnegiehall.org, or at the Carnegie Hall box office, 57th Street at 7th Ave.
About ACO
Founded in 1977, American Composers Orchestra is the only orchestra in the world dedicated to the creation, performance, preservation and promulgation of music by American composers. Through its concerts at Carnegie Hall, recordings, radio broadcasts, educational programs, New Music Readings and commissions, ACO identifies today's brightest emerging composers, champions prominent established composers as well as those lesser-known, and increases regional, national and international awareness of the infinite variety of American orchestral music, reflecting geographic, stylistic, and temporal diversity. [find out more]
Major support of American Composers Orchestra is from Alliance Capital Management L.P., Amphion Foundation, ASCAP, The Bagby Foundation for the Musical Arts, Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, Bodman Foundation, Booth Ferris Foundation, BMI Foundation, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, Citigroup Foundation, Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, Edward T. Cone Foundation, Consolidated Edison, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Eleanor Naylor Dana Charitable Trust, Jean and Louis Dreyfus Foundation, Fidelity Foundation, The Fromm Foundation, Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, The Estate of Francis Goelet, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Greenwall Foundation, The Hauser Foundation, Henfield Foundation, Victor Herbert Foundation, Geoffrey Hughes Foundation, Christian Humann Foundation, Jephson Educational Trust, The Jerome Foundation, Helen Sperry Lea Foundation, Koussevitzky Foundation, Meet the Composer, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, JPMorganChase, National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences Foundation, The New York Times Co. Foundation, Josephine Bay Paul and C. Michael Paul Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Fan Fox & Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, the Virgil Thomson Foundation, Oakleigh L. Thorne Foundation, and The Helen F. Whitaker Fund. ACO programs are also made possible with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
All artists and programs subject to change.
Last updated June 11, 2004
