[silence] SEM Orchestra: Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall

[S.E.M. Ensemble]

Monday, May 21, 2007 at 8 pm
ZANKEL HALL AT CARNEGIE HALL
(7th Ave. at W 57th St, New York)

The Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble
With guests
Ostravská banda (Ostrava, Czech Republic)
Petr Kotik, Conductor
Thomas Buckner, Baritone
Joseph Kubera, Piano
Lajos Tóth, Percussion

Stefan Wolpe                          Chamber Piece No. 1
Earle Brown                            Available Forms I
Richard Strauss                       Metamorphosen
Somei Satoh                            The Last Song
Karlheinz Stockhausen            Zeitmaße
Iannis Xenakis                         Palimpsest

Tickets: $25, $15 € $15, $10 students/seniors & Friends of SEM*
CarnegieCharge (212) 247-7800 www.carnegiehall.com
Patron Tickets*: $80 Preferred orchestra seats
Patron tickets include post-concert reception with featured artists and
guests.
*Available through SEM Office only. (718)488-7659
www.semEnsemble.org -- info@semEnsemble.org

Preview Performance: Sunday, May 20 at 8 pm, Willow Place Auditorium in
Brooklyn Heights

Chamber Piece No. 1 (1964) for chamber orchestra presents Stefan Wolpe¹s
(Berlin 1902 - New York 1972) uncompromising hard-edged musical language in
its purest form. Wolpe¹s works, especially his compositions after 1950,
could be considered a high point of abstract expressionism. They are based
on his serial method, developed in the 1920s when he was active in his
native Berlin. In 1928, German musicologist Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt
observed Wolpe¹s music as ³Plunging from ecstasy to ecstasy, from extreme to
extreme, passionately investigating the materials and ideology of his art.²

During the 1950s, Wolpe was welcomed by the New York abstract expressionist
painters and attended their meetings at the Eighth Street Club. Esteban
Vicente, a member of the Club, saw clearly the impact of this environment on
Wolpe's music. Wolpe's spatial concept was strengthened, and he began to
work out a system of spatial proportions that informed his music from 1950
into the sixties. At the same time, Wolpe was seeking a way to get beyond
classical twelve-tone theory, developing variations of a new constellatory
form.

Wolpe prepared charts for many aspects of his pieces but applied them with
great latitude so that the unforeseen possibilities of the material would
reveal themselves during the act of composing: "The charts one sets are the
little candles one carries in front of one's own imagination, which then
very often are not bright enough for what one discoversŠThe protocol can
exist under conditions of a great latitude, from the most stringent to the
most improvisatory situation² (Wolpe). While certain elements were
pre-compositionally determined, Wolpe¹s music was open to unforeseen
procedures. According to Wolpe, "Virtually everything is admitted, provided
it is included in an asymmetrical sequence of events [so] that no
hierarchical order either precedes or controls it."
                   
--Notes derived in part from Austin Clarkson

Earle Brown (1927-2002) belongs to a group of American composers (along with
Cage, Feldman, and Wolff) who redefined the music of the 20th century. Brown
contributed some of the most original ideas, including the introduction of
"open form," proportional and graphic notations and the use of indeterminacy
as part of performance.

Brown first studied mathematics and engineering and attended the Schillinger
School of Music to study composition and orchestration.  In 1951, while
living in Denver, Colorado, Brown met John Cage, who was touring with Merce
Cunningham. After seeing Brown's scores and hearing his music, he invited
Brown to New York to join his group, consisting of Cage, Morton Feldman,
David Tudor and Christian Wolff. A year later, Brown moved to New York where
he became a member of Cage's inner circle.  With Cage and Tudor, he became
the associate composer for the Project of Music for Magnetic Tape (1952-55).
His first wife, Carolyn Brown, became a member of the Cunningham Dance
Company where she was the leading dancer until 1972.  Shortly after his
arrival in New York, Brown created his ground-breaking composition Folio
(1952), where he introduced graphic and proportional notations, ideas that
influenced both Cage and Wolff. Later, Brown introduced the concept of "open
form" in 25 Pages for 1-25 pianos (1953), and extended the concept in his
orchestral works, Available Forms I (1961) and Available Forms II for two
orchestras (1962). The concept of "open form" was influenced by Brown's
encounter with the works of sculptor Alexander Calder and painter Jackson
Pollock. 

Available Forms I was composed for the Darmstadt festival. It represents the
culmination of Brown¹s attempts to realize in musical form ideas
corresponding to the artists with whom he associated at that time,
especially Calder, Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg. Calder¹s concept of
mobile sculpture was a great source of inspiration for Brown.

Richard Strauss (1864-1949) composed Metamorphosen in April of 1945. In the
last days of World War II, after a long period of terror and frustration,
Strauss saw the end of Europe as he knew it. The last blow must have been
the destruction of the Munich Opera House in the early days of 1945, where
his father used to play French horn in the orchestra. This set the backdrop
for Metamorphosen, which Strauss must have composed without any concern for
the reaction of the public or the critics ­ such concern would have seemed
trivial at the time. The piece unfolds in many ways as though it were
written today, with no trace of classical form.

In Metamorphosen, all the material is presented in the first few minutes,
and what follows is a stream of music that can best be described with the
following words from Morton Feldman about a text by Samuel Beckett:
³Šthere's something peculiar about it. I can't catch it. Finally I see that
every line is really the same thought said in another way. And yet the
continuity acts as if something else is happening. Nothing else is
happening. What you're doing, in an almost Proustian way, is getting deeper
and deeper saturated into the thought.²

The Last Song (2005) sets a text by Walt Whitman for baritone and orchestra.
The piece was commissioned by Mutable Music for the baritone Thomas Buckner,
Petr Kotik and the SEM Orchestra. Somei Satoh examines here the possibility
of a fusion between Western sensibilities, especially those of the American
minimalists, and his Japanese heritage. Satoh¹s elegant and passionate style
convincingly integrates these diverse elements into an approach that is
unmistakably his own.

Zeitmaße (1955-56) was composed while Karlheinz Stockhausen was working on
Gruppen for 3 orchestras. Both works are ground-breaking, presenting the
first attempt at cycling segments of controlled, non-simultaneous
performance through a subdivided ensemble. Whereas in Zeitmaße this vertical
independence creates interplay between 5 wind instruments (a woodwind
quintet, replacing French horn with English horn), in Gruppen it unfolds
between three orchestras, led by 3 conductors (the three orchestras surround
the audience in a spatially arranged stage setting). In both compositions,
the music alternates between coordination and independence within the
ensemble.

Palimpsest (1979) was commissioned by L¹Accedemia Filarmonica Romana and is
dedicated to Adriana Panni. The title refers to a piece of parchment or
paper on which the writing has been rubbed out and replaced by new text,
thus creating a multilayer document. Iannis Xenakis composed Palimpsest as a
quasi-concerto for piano, percussion, winds and strings. The multilayer
character of the music is evident in the scoring for the ensemble, but even
more extraordinary are the demands on the solo instruments. In the piano and
percussion parts, the left and right hands are often written independently,
as though they belong to two different musicians.

This concert is possible thanks to support from New York City¹s Department
of Cultural Affairs, The New York State Council on the Arts, The New York
State Music Fund, The Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the Phaedrus
Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Czech Center New York, the
City of Ostrava, OKD a.s. Ostrava, John Bergman, Sheldon and Mary Berlow,
Carolyn Brown, Merry Conway, Rackstraw Downes, Ulla Dydo, Douglas and
Rosalie Guthrie, Raymond Learsy, Susan Sollins-Brown, Christian Wolff, and
additional anonymous donations. This concert is presented in co-production
with the Ostrava Center for New Music, the World Music Institute¹s
Interpretations Series, and Czech Center New York.



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