Press Release for February 2010
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PRESS RELEASE 

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Irene Haupt - General Manager: haupt@amusicalfeast.com
For tickets: 878-6011 or burchffd@buffalostate.ed

PROGRAM NOTES FEBRUARY 2010

The opening of Czech composer Bohuslav Martin¥'s Duo No.2 (1958) evokes the clangor of bells, and, indeed, this prolific composer was born with the sound of church bells ringing joyously all round him (His father was the bell ringer and watchman in the little Bohemian town of Policka, and the family lived in the small tower room of the church of St. James!). In his teens, Martin¥ (1890-1959) studied in Prague, and it was fortunate for a young composer of his time that Prague was a crossroads of culture, where one could hear works by Strauss, Bruckner, Debussy, and even Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Bartók.

The Duo No. 2 for Violin and Cello, commissioned by Swiss musicologist Ernst Mohr, quickly emerged over a four-day period in June/July 1958 at the Schönenberg Estate in Pratteln of Paul Sacher, the Swiss conductor and musical patron. Martin¥ did not live to hear his duo performed; the work's public premiere came in the spring of 1963.  Despite dating from his final period of physical illness and infirmity, Martin¥'s Duo No.2 is enlivened by the optimism and rhythmic brio that characterize many of his earlier compositions.  The outer movements are lively and rhythmically playful, while the work's emotional center lies in the soulful central Adagio.

Éric Alfred Leslie Satie (1866-1925) was a French composer and pianist. Starting with his first composition in 1884, he signed his name as "Erik Satie." Satie was introduced as a "gymnopedist" in 1887, shortly before writing his most famous compositions, the Gymnopédies. Later, he also referred to himself as a "phonometrician" (meaning "someone who measures sounds") preferring this designation to that of "musician," after having been called "a clumsy but subtle technician" in a book on contemporary French composers published in 1911. From 1920, he was on friendly terms with the circles around Gertrude Stein, amongst others, leading to the publication of some of his articles in Vanity Fair (commissioned by Sibyl Harris).  He was a precursor to later artistic movements such as minimalism, repetitive music, and the Theater of the Absurd. He mentored the "Les Six" group of six young French composers, who, under his influence and that of Cocteau had achieved notoriety through their advanced ideas) and promoted the concept of musique d'ameublement (furniture music), anticipating the impact of radio. Foremost amongst those composers influenced by Satie was his contemporary Debussy, and also Ravel and Stravinsky. The music of Erik Satie was instrumental in opening doors in musical expression, so that a number of sub-genres or "schools" could explore new territory.  Above all, Satie provided one of the sparks that set Debussy on a course towards the "Impressionism" movement.

 Cage wrote: I found in the largely German community at Black Mountain College a lack of experience of the music of Erik Satie. Therefore, teaching there one summer and having no pupils, I arranged a festival of Satie's music, half-hour after-dinner concerts with introductory remarks. And in the center of the festival I placed a lecture that opposed Satie and Beethoven and found that Satie, not Beethoven, was right. Buckminster Fuller was the Baron Méduse in a performance of Satie's Le Piège de Méduse. That summer Fuller put up his first dome, which immediately collapsed. He was delighted. "I only learn what to do when I have failures." We are living in a period in which many people have changed their mind about what the use of music is or could be for them. Something that doesn't speak or talk like a human being, that doesn't know its definition in the dictionary or its theory in the schools, that expresses itself simply by the fact of its vibrations. People paying attention to vibratory activity, not in reaction to a fixed ideal performance, but each time attentively to how it happens to be this time, not necessarily two times the same. A music that transports the listener to the moment where he is.

ANIMUS III for clarinet and electronic tape (1969) by Jacob Druckman is the third of a series of works for live performers and tape.   Each of the works is involved with the actual presence of the performers theatrically, as well as musically.   Each work limits its focus to a particular area of human affection as well as to a limited body of musical materials.   Each work presumes that the theatrical and musical elements are inseparable; that the performance of the drama in inherent in the ideal performance of the music.  ANIMUS III deals with virtuosity.  The ideal performance gradually develops a theatrical image which is a projection of the mindless aspects of virtuosity.