Compositions

Works for clarinet/bass clarinet

By The Numbers (2017) - Clar/Bs Cl, Vln, Piano - 2 Mvts - 14"

Clarinet/Bass Clarinet, Violin, Retuned Piano - 2 movements: Discordion, Concordia

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PROGRAM NOTES BY THE COMPOSER:

By The Numbers was written in homage to Lou Harrison, on the occasion of his centennial, and was premiered at ICA Boston on October 12, 2017, Johnny Gandelsman, violin; Sarah Cahill, piano; myself on clarinet and bass clarinet. In the original version, the piano needs to be tuned to the unique and complex just intonation scale required to perform Lou's Concerto for Piano w/Javanese Gamelan with his own Si Betty instruments. So, as the title suggests, the piece is indelibly link to Lou's music 'by the numbers:' by design, it walks in Lou's footprints.

The radical tuning of the piano presents delights and challenges: deeper consonances and weirder dissonances. For By The Numbers I approach these as a dialectic: the first movement, Discordion, delights in the dissonances; the second, Concordia, revels in the consonances.

Old Growth (2013) - Bs Clar & Fixed Media - 15’30"

Bass clarinet and fixed media (audio and optional video), 4 movements
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PROGRAM NOTES BY THE COMPOSER:
The four movements of Old Growth are inspired by and composed around archival, mid-20th century field recordings from Africa and Indonesia. The backing tracks all use samples from these recordings, looped and filtered in various ways, and combined with other electronics. Mugangara, Malume, and Mugasha contain samples from the CD “Tanzania Instruments 1950,” originally recorded by Hugh Tracey for the Institute of African Music. They are used with permission of SWP Records. The musicians on the original tracks are: Mugangara - Ruthahindurwa Lukaka; Malume - Ngaina Nolo & Mtonya Bota; Mugasha - Habib Bin Seliman. Wargasari is built around Balinese vocalist Ni Lemon's 1928 recording of the same name with the Janger Abian Timbul group, originally recorded for Odeon. The remastered original track, Kidung Wargasari, is available on the “Roots of Gamelan Volume 2” CD and is used with the permission of World Arbiter Records.

Atlas (2012) - Clar, Sarod, Voice, Dancer - 6"

clarinet, sarod, voice, kathak dancer
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Three Nyatitis (2012) - Clarinet, Viola, Banjo 15'

banjo, clarinet (in A & B-flat), viola - 3 movements
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commissioned by Roger Michel, first performance Muthaiga Club, Nairobi, Kenya, 2012; first US performance, Odd Fellows Club, Boston, 2012

Hive (2007) - Clar 4tet - 17'

clarinet quartet - 2 clarinets, 2 bass clarinets

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PROGRAM NOTES BY THE COMPOSER:
Hive grows out of my experience as an amateur beekeeper, in both sound and structure. Honeybee society predates our own, and in many ways the encounter with the apis is like encountering extraterrestrials, full of shocking similarities and profound differences. Hive is not strictly programmatic, but it does contain elements that come directly out of this encounter. For example, happy bees seem to vibrate a collective "A"; when agitated, this rises to a "C": this is the source of the opening oscillations in the music. The overall shape of the piece - swirls and flight patterns, frenzied accruals, followed by a long, zen-like stasis - mirrors the larger life-cycle of the hive, where the summer's buzz of activity is followed by a unique quasi-hibernation, the throng bundling together for warmth and protection, patiently vibrating their way through the winter. Recording the piece in frozen Minnesota during January, this seemed especially apt.

Commissioned by the University of Minnesota, Duluth for Theodore Schoen

Big Grenadilla (2006) - Bs Clar & Ch Orch - 15'

Concerto for bass clarinet and chamber orchestra: solo bc/1.1.1.1/1.1.1.1/3 perc/pno/hp/strgs min 4-4-3-2-2

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PROGRAM NOTES BY THE COMPOSER:
Big Grenadilla was commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra, with myself as soloist. Bass clarinet is the instrument I know best, thrust into my hands in high school, and never far from me since. Musicians and their instruments, in hand and mouth, mind and body: metaphors come quickly. It’s a life partner, and I write for it as I would write for another human being, ideally using my music to reveal the instrument’s own physical and spiritual character. Of course this is ventriliqual, a story I tell myself. In practical terms, the vocabulary of Big Grenadilla is contoured to the acoustic characteristics of the horn, rather than the other way around.

The concerto is traditionally a heroic form, which doesn’t jibe well with an egalitarian approach to music. But given the chance to be at stage front amid New York’s finest musicians, it would be foolish to squander the occasion. “Big Grenadilla” is my second bass clarinet/large ensemble work: five years before it, I composed and performed “Drill,” for bass clarinet and wind ensemble, casting myself in the role of drill sergeant, leading the troops through a vigorous basic training. But in this work, among colleagues, the soloist and conductor are first among equals, leading a boisterous band, er, orchestra.

The title: grenadilla is a dense, strong dark wood that is often mistaken for ebony. It continues to grow in abundance on the African steppe. It is the primary wood for many instruments, including the bass clarinet, whose bottom joint alone is a single piece 30 inches in length. Big grenadilla, yearning for its living, rooted reality, with the orchestra providing the dreamscape.

Big Grenadilla was premiered in Carnegie's Zankel Hall in 2006, with Brad Lubman conducting the American Composers Orchestra. 60 years earlier, in that same building, Woody Herman premiered Stravinsky’s pocket-sized “Ebony Concerto”. Title aside, I claim no conscious connection to this masterpiece, but simply bow my head in homage. It is the Kilimanjaro of my own African landscape. We steppe-dwellers continue to gaze up in awe.

Belle Labs (2006) - Cl, Vln, Robot - 20'

violin, clarinet, and robotic xylophone (Heliphon)

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commissioned by Ensemble Robot and Boston Museum of Science, premiered January 25, 2005 by Evan Ziporyn and Todd Reynolds

Thread (2005) - Cl, A.Fl, Vln, Cello - 25'

clarinet, alto and bass flute, violin, cello - one movement

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commissioned and premiered by Dinosaur Annex, Cambridge, MA June 2005

Drill (2002) - Bs Clar & Wind Ens - 10'

Concerto for bass clarinet and wind ensemble: solo bc/pic, 2 fl, 2 ob, 2 cl, 1 bc, 2 bsn, cbsn, ssax, asax, tsax, bsax, 4 hn, 4 trpt, 3 trb, 1 btrb, 1 euph, 1 tuba, 1 cb, 5 perc

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PROGRAM NOTES BY THE COMPOSER:
The concerto form springs from romanticism: its default metaphor is that of the heroic individual, emerging from and exalted by his fellow man. This is not really my thing, but I do have a strong desire to make music with my wind brethren, to do things on our instruments together. Having taught for over a decade, I am also conscious of the complex ways in which teachers and students relate, and this piece reflects this, at least in my mind. In war movies and sitcoms, it's always struck me that the drill sergeant works at least as hard as the recruits, running alongside, exhorting and cajoling to be sure, but never really asking them to do things he himself couldn't or wouldn't do. Not that that necessarily has anything to do with the title of this piece, I just thought I'd mention it. Drill is the first of a projected three-movement work, written for Fred Harris and the MIT Wind Ensemble.

commissioned by the MIT Wind Ensemble, Fred Harris, director

No Return (2002) - Clarinet, Violin & Fixed Media 30'

4 movements for violin, clarinet, and sounds of the Salmon River: Postcard, Upstream, No Return, Night Sit

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No Return: River Impressions 2002 was commissioned by the Sun Valley Center for the Arts as part of the Whole Salmon Exhibition. This commission was made possibly by generous gifts from Katherine Abelson and the Jeri L. Waxenberg Foundation. The first performance took place in Ketchum, Idaho in January 2003, with Todd Reynolds, violin, and the composer on clarinet.

Tight Fitting Garments (2000)- Clarinet & Violin - 15'

Clarinet & Violin: "It Is And It Isn't," "Illusions of Purity," "Jubilee of Indifference"

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Jubilee of Indifference (1999)- Clarinet & Violin - 3'30"

Clarinet & Violin

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NOTES BY THE COMPOSER:

Jubilee of Indifference was composed as part of a larger duo project, Tight Fitting Garments, for myself and violinist Todd Reynolds. That project was conceived to be evolving and modular, so its various movements have been used in a number of different contexts, both under that overall title and as parts of other multi-movement works and installations. JoI has proven to be able to function independently, i.e., as a stand-alone piece on programs of other works.

In the score, I’ve not indicated dynamics, phrasing, or articulation; also the tempo marking itself can be interpreted in numerous ways. All these elements – everything other than the pitches and rhythms, in the order in which they’re written – are left to the players, with the understanding that the piece works best when there’s a tight synchrony between all of the above, i.e., when the two players sound as much like a single instrument as possible. Over many performances we did find (news flash) that using all of the above effectively – varying dynamics, working out phrasing and articulation, i.e., being musical – tended to make things sound better, but, hey...feel free to prove me wrong...

Four Impersonations (1999) - Solo Clar - 18'

solo clarinet
Honshirabe (4:00) Bindu Semara (5:30) Thum Nyatiti (2:30) Pengrangrang Gede (5:30)

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PROGRAM NOTES BY THE COMPOSER:
Four Impersonations consists of four movements, all based closely on careful transcriptions of melodies from other cultures. Each requires a few particular extended techniques, all explained in the preparatory notes to each movement.

In Balinese trance, as in many similar traditions throughout the world, subjects are inhabited by specific people or entities who speak through them. Their voice remains their own, but the words they speak are foreign to them, often in ancient or foreign languages they themselves do not understand. In these pieces the voices of three different cultures - Japanese shakuhachi ("Honshirabe"), Balinese gamelan ("Pengrangrang Gde" and “Bindu Semara”), and East African nyatiti ("Thum Nyatiti") - speak through the clarinet. As a rational westerner, I've transcribed and translated, found ways to play them, but as a trance subject-wannabe I leave the interpretation to others.

Four Impersonations was completed in 2000, and is recorded on This Is Not A Clarinet (Cantaloupe 21002)

Partial Truths (1999) - Solo Bs Clar - 17'

solo bass clarinet

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PROGRAM NOTES BY THE COMPOSER:
Partial Truths (1999) is my longest work for solo bass clarinet to date, part of my ongoing efforts to reflect on my own relationship to my instrument, and thus to music making in general. The title is deliberately ambiguous, but refers at least in part to acoustical ‘partials’ (overtones), in that the musical substance resides in the entire overtone spectrum rather than simply in the fundamentals. Melodies and harmonies rise out of the physical reality of the instrument, imply and insinuate, then merge back into the ether. It is dedicated to Arnold Dreyblatt.

Tsmindao Ghmerto (1994) - Solo Bs Clar - 4'

solo bc/pic

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PROGRAM NOTES BY THE COMPOSER:
Tsmindao Ghmerto is based on Zakaria Paliashvili’s (1871-1933) stunning setting of the hymn of the same name, a Sanctus from the liturgy of the Georgian Orthodox Church. To replicate 3-part choral harmony on the bass clarinet, an instrument generally regarded as monophonic, the soloist is asked to hum perfectly tuned drone notes into the instrument almost continuously throughout the piece. Intonation is much more important than volume, particularly in the hummed part – it doesn’t have to be as loud as the sound of the bass clarinet itself. If the notes are in tune, whatever their volume, the original harmonies will not only be felt but will be enhanced by overtones and other aural artifacts, expected and unexpected, any and all of which are desirable.

Please also be mindful of the lyrics of the original, which are:

Tsmindao Ghmerto	Holy God
Tsmindao Zliero	Holy mighty
Tsmindao Ukvdao	Holy immortal
Shegvitskalen chven.	Have mercy on us

The hummed ‘vocal’ line is indicated on a separate staff but to be done by the same player, much like the left hand in a piano part. It is transposed to B-flat so that the performer can more easily conceptualize the intervallic relationships between the two parts.

Tsmindao Ghmerto was recorded by Evan Ziporyn and released as part of Bang on a Can: Cheating, Lying, Stealing (Sony Classical, 1996). Subsequently re-released on Bang on a Can Classics (Cantaloupe Music, 2002).

A 7-minute version of Tsmindao Ghmerto for bass clarinet and wind ensemble is available in print edition only. For more information contact info@airplaneears.com

Walk the Dog (1990) - Bs Clar & Fixed Media - 25'

Bass clarinet and fixed media (audio)

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PROGRAM NOTES BY THE COMPOSER:
Walk the Dog is a one-movement concerto for bass clarinet and tape, originally conceived (in 1988/9, for my doctorate at UC Berkeley) as an orchestra piece. As work progressed I realized that what I really wanted was an impossibility, at least for me at that time: a world ensemble, with Egyptian film orchestra strings, Gambian harps, Balinese genggong, Shona mbira, digjeridoos, etc. So I scrapped the orchestral version and enlisted Ted Kuhn, a wonderful musician who had both a good sample library (a rarity in those days) and the ear to know what to do with it. As a result, the sonic texture of the piece matches its melodies and rhythms, which are also East/West, electro/acoustic hybrids. Deep thanks to Ted and his sonic creativity for his huge contribution to this piece.

Be-In (1990) - Bs Clar & Chamber Ens (3 Versions) - 9'

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Bass clarinet and string quartet
3 Clarinets, 2 bass clarinets
Amplified Sextet (clarinet, drums, mandolin, electric piano, cello, bass)

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PROGRAM NOTES BY THE COMPOSER:
My earliest goal in life - formulated during a 1968 trip to San Francisco with my parents - was to be a hippie. My family drove our Ford Country Squire from Chicago, we went to Haight-Ashbury to gawk, and I was hooked. At age 13 I spent a week at my aunt's Ann Arbor commune and my aspirations were confirmed. Only later was this replaced by the marginally more respectable goal of writing music. The two remain intertwined: anything I've done that was musically worthwhile was made possible by the 60s. Everyone who was anyone was reaching out to non-western music - not just Stockhausen and the Beatles, but also B.J. Thomas and the Partridge Family - all 'went raga' at some point or another. Much of my work is built around the anomalies and contradictions of cross-cultural exchange, but in this piece there are no such problems: gestures from a variety of genres are combined as if all that were needed to make them get along were good will and positive energy. Would that it were so...

The original version of Be-in was written very quickly, for a group called "Evan and the All-stars," which gave a single performance in Hartford, in 1991. I had only recently gotten my first computer – a MacPlus with a 20MB external hard drive – and this was one of the first pieces I didn’t notate by hand. Surprise surprise, the system crashed, I lost everything, so what you will hear is only a memory of the piece I originally wrote. It has had several other incarnations, re-orchestrated for the Michael Gordon Philharmonic, for a baroque-folk consort, for string orchestra, and for clarinet choir. The C-drone that starts the piece is homage to Terry Riley and to the late violist John Lad, who played it dozens of time, and who was himself a participant in the original 'be-in,' in San Francisco on January 14, 1967, the official start of the Age of Aquarius.

What She Saw There (1988) - Bs Clar, 2 Perc - 13'

bass clarinet (or cello) and 2 marimbas

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PROGRAM NOTES BY THE COMPOSER:
What She Saw There was written in Indonesia in the fall of 1987. I was at that time listening to a lot of epic songs in languages I didn't understand, such as Mandarin, Swahili, and Balinese. This piece attempts to evoke a feeling of abstracted narrative, to tell a tale about an unspecified, incomprehensible place, in an equally slippery language. In the process, many semi-recognizable musical styles with which I felt myself to be familiar get "retold". The original version was for cello, and was commissioned (my first: $300, which I was very grateful to get) and premiered by Mary Artmann, accompanied by marimbists William Winant and John Keith.

Waiting By The Phone (1986) - Solo Clar - 12'

solo clarinet

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PROGRAM NOTES BY THE COMPOSER:
Like all my clarinet music, I wrote this for myself, in 1985/6; at that time I didn’t really consider the possibility of another player trying to decipher my intentions. So the original version had no instructions other than the markings at the beginning of each section. I later typed up the explanations printed on the page preceding the score, with the intention of giving players the same latitude I gave myself regarding dynamics, tempo, timbre, etc. This basically comes down to: feel free.

Waiting by the Phone is, from an admittedly subjective perspective, a cognitive self-portrait, an attempt to convey a way of being (thought, action, experience) that, for better or worse, prevailed within me in the mid-1980s. Something related to John Lennon’s 'life is what happens while you’re making other plans.” This piece being the feeling of that particular ‘what happens.’ In common with many composers writing for melodic instruments, I attempt to give the illusion of polyphony, multiple lines, harmony. In true polyphony no single voice prevails: here this combines with a wandering sense of tempo to project a somewhat diffuse consciousness, only gradually and ephemerally becoming aware of its own nature. There are four sections, the first three quite roughly modeled on Hindustani alap, jhala, and tal. The fourth and final section came out of late nights rehearsing in Berkeley’s Hertz Hall, where I could roam the huge stage and go up and down the aisles while playing, then stop to regard the resonance gradually turning into silence.

Two Obsessions (1980)- Solo Clar - 15'

solo clarinet
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PROGRAM NOTES BY THE COMPOSER:
Two Obsessions were my first pieces for solo clarinet, composed in Oakland, CA in the summer of 1980, and completed in a mad rush in New Haven for a premiere at a Yale student composers concert that fall. I had gone to California based on a cold-call to a total stranger, Michael Tenzer, who had just started Gamelan Sekar Jaya. Michael kindly invited me to join for the summer, and that in itself was life-changing. While there I also met and had the opportunity to hang out with flute god Robert Dick, who was briefly concertizing in the Bay Area. His galactic mastery of extended techniques was mind-blowing to me, so I asked him how I could go about learning them on the clarinet. He told me to 'just dig around in there, you'll find some things.' I'm still digging, but these are the first things I found.

33 Vortices (1978) - 5 clarinets - 10'

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Works for Gamelan

Air = Water (2019) - Gamelan 4tet & String 4tet - 13"

Gamelan Quartet & String Quartet: 2 Movements (Ombak=Waves, Hujan=Rain)

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Commissioned by Network for New Music, Philadelphia
Completed February 2, 2019; Revised April 2019 & July 2020
First performance April 7, 2019, by Network for New Music (Thomas Schuttenhelm, Artistic Director) featuring Gamelan Semara Santi (Thomas Whitman, director)

Sa'at Sadar (2018) - American Gamelan 6tet - 5'30"

American Gamelan 6tet (Old Granddad #4)

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NOTES by the composer

Sa’at Sadar is composed for Old Granddad #4 (OGD4), a set of 6 ‘American gamelan’ instruments designed by Lou Harrison & William Colvig, for use in several of Harrison’s later works. Made from steel and aluminum tubes, the instruments are tuned to a simple, elegant just intonation diatonic scale.

As the ‘#4’ indicates, this particular set is a copy/improvement on 3 prior sets, all of similar design, purpose, and intonation. OGD4 was originally built for Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s performance of Harrison’s Le Koro Sutro in 2009, it was then bought by Harrison estate executor Jody Diamond, for the purpose of keeping the instruments in active use. During Harrison’s centennial, in 2017, Jody loaned OGD4 to MIT’s Gamelan Galak Tika, which I direct, to perform his Suite for Violin and American Gamelan. We all fell in love with the instruments and soon formed an informal composers collective to create new works for the instruments. As of this writing this has produced 5 complete new works - by Dewa Alit, Jody Diamond, Donovan Edelstein, Ryan Meyer, and myself – as well as several student works-in-progress.

Sa’at Sadar can be translated from Bahasa Indonesia in several ways: the two I prefer are ‘Moment of Clarity’ and ‘When I Knew.’ It was premiered May 5, 2019 in MIT’s Kresge Auditorium. The performers were Galak Tika members Djenet Bousbaine, Donovan Edelstein, Minjae Kim, Evan Lynch, Ryan Meyer, Sachi Sato, and Evan Ziporyn.

Tunggal (2016) - Solo Javanese bonang - 12'

Solo Javanese bonang (solo vibraphone version also available)

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Hujan Arja (2012) - Balinese Gamelan Semara Dana - 12'

Balinese gamelan semara dana (7-toned gong kebyar)

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Commissioned by, made with, and performed by Gamelan Semara Ratih, Ubud, Bali

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Lapanbelas (2010) - Balinese Gamelan Semara Dana - 18'

Balinese gamelan semara dana (7-toned gong kebyar)

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Commissioned by, made with, and performed by Gamelan Semara Ratih, Ubud, Bali

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Bali Tiba (from A House in Bali) (2009) - Balinese Gamelan Gong Kebyar - 7'

Balinese gamelan gong kebyar

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Performed by Gamelan Salukat as part of "A House in Bali"

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Bayu Sabda Idep (2007) - Str Orch & Mixed Gamelan Ensemble - 27'

Just Intonation slendro chamber gamelan and chamber string orchestra

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Instrumentation:
Pelog Balinese trompong or reong (in approximate ISI tuning, notated C#-ding D-dong E-deng G#-dung A-dang)
8 custom designed 'Beta Gamelan' gender (2 kantil, 2 pemade, 2 jublag, 2 jegogan, notated F#-dong A-deng B-dung C#-dang E-ding, designated ‘high/low’ for pengisep/pengumbang divisi)
Balinese gong set: wadon, lanang, kempur, kenong
Balinese kendang kebyar
Strings (minimum 4-4-3-3-1), tuned approximately to A=443 (i.e., 12 cents sharp)

PROGRAM NOTES BY THE COMPOSER:
Bayu Sabda Idep (Energy Voice Idea) comprise the Balinese concept of 'Tri Premane' (3 life forces), which together distinguish humanity from plants (who have life-energy but no voice) and animals (who have energy and voice but no abstract thought). The ability to control, balance, and project these forces is understood by the Balinese to be the distinguishing mark of great performers, particularly the great shadow-puppet masters or dalang. This piece is in three large sections, which in turn emphasize one of these forces. The first movement, Idep, builds on an exoskeletal formal architecture; the second, Bayu, is propelled by rhythmic motion; the third, Sabda, simply sings. I wrote the piece in the wake of the death of my teacher, the great gender wayang master I Wayan Loceng, with whom I studied in the late 1980s. An unrelentingly demanding teacher, Pak Wayan's musical virtuosity was matched by his knowledge of the wayang (shadow play) itself, and it was said that he had had a hand in the training of all the great dalang of Sukawati Village, the center of puppetry in Bali, where he lived his entire life. A dalang is a revered, quasi-religious figure in Bali; his musicians 'follow' him for a fraction of his wages and little or no personal recognition. Pak Wayan thus spent much of his performing career in the shadow of his own students, but more importantly in the service of an ancient art-form that was far more important to him than renown or wealth. I began this piece around the same time I learned of his death, and I felt his presence continually, not in a literal sense but in a compulsion to compose a work that would reflect his human and artistic values.

Most of the Balinese instruments in this piece were custom-made for this project and are non-traditional in tuning and design. Traditional Balinese instruments are tuned in distinctive, non-tempered scales which only match western tuning by coincidence. I have written for these wonderfully unwieldy bi-cultural combinations for many years, but in this piece I wanted something else: a tuning that would allow for the possibility of harmonization and consonance with western instruments while still having a distinctive, non-tempered character. The tuning I designed is an attempt to 'square the circle' - combining the basic structure of the Balinese slendro scale with principles of just intonation, that is, simple intervallic ratios, and centering the tones on a more-or-less precisely tuned 'A'. (I say more-or-less because the end result was slightly different than that which I had specified, but it sounded so good that we retained it!). Thus the melodies and harmonies constantly move in and out of the realm of the recognizable over the course of the piece. The instruments were built by Pande Made Sukerta of Blahbatuh. The project as a whole is the brainchild of Karl Middleman, who called me out of the blue and bravely went along with the whole scheme.

Bayu Sabda Idep was commissioned by the New Philadelphia Classical Symphony - Karl Middleman, Artistic Director - as part of its 'Gateways to Global Music' series, and is made possible through the generous support of the Philadelphia Music Project, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, and administered by the University of the Arts. Premier performances are April 20 and 21, 2007 at the Trinity Life Center and Westtown School, respectively.

Cu(Bali)Bre (2007) - Balinese Gender Wayang - 3'30"

Balinese gender wayang duo

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Sabar Gong (2005) (in collaboration w/Lamine Touré) - Balinese Gamelan & Sabar Drums - 5'

Balinese gamelan with Senegalese Sabar drums

Aradhana (2004) - Balinese Gamelan Gong Kebyar w/Solo Koto/Shamisen - 15'

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Balinese gamelan with Solo Koto/Shamisen

PROGRAM NOTES by the composer:
Aradhana brings together instruments from two distinct Asian musical traditions. My purpose in composing for koto and shamisen together with Balinese gamelan is simply the joy of exploration and collaboration, and the hope of finding beauty both in the unexpected connections and discrepancies. As the dedication indicates, I originally wrote the piece for Chinese pipa, specifically the outstanding virtuoso Wu Man, with whom my ensemble performed the piece numerous times. I am forever grateful to Wu Man for inspiring the piece in the first place, and even more for playing it so brilliantly.

Years later, in 2016, I composed a short solo work for Sumie Kaneko, who is equally adept on koto and shamisen. I realized that the sounds of these two instruments, respectively, were extremely well-suited for the two halves of Aradhana; thus this present version.

The piece calls for some unusual gamelan techniques, most prominently the use of cello and bass bows and make attack-less, sustained sounds on the metallophones. The title comes from 'arad,' the old Javanese word for bowing, which also means to pull or create. Other related words are 'peng-arad' a draft horse; 'arad-aradan' - to attract, to lure; 'peng-aradan' - the bow of the bow of the rebab; and finally, 'aradhana' - to call up from a distance or from the unseen.

First performance with pipa: May 14, 2004 - Kresge Auditorium, Cambridge, MA - Wu Man, soloist; Gamelan Galak Tika, Evan Ziporyn, director

First performance with koto and shamisen; December 3, 2016 - Kresge Auditorium, Cambridge, MA - Sumie Kaneko, soloist; Gamelan Galak Tika, Evan Ziporyn, director

Ngaben (for Sari Club) (2003) - Balinese Gamelan Gong Kebyar & Orchestra - 15'

Balinese gamelan & orchestra

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NOTES by the composer

A terrorist bomb destroyed the Sari Club in Kuta Beach, Bali on October 12, 2002. I had just begun working on a very different type of piece for gamelan and orchestra, but the printed images of Balinese women crying and praying at the blast site overwhelmed me and changed the direction of the music.

The ngaben cremation is the last and most important life ritual in Balinese Hinduism. Like a traditional New Orleans funeral, it encompasses a wide range of emotions. The entire village participates, preparations are extensive, and the overall mood is decidedly unmournful. The loss is acknowledged, but it is subsumed by the far more important task of releasing the soul from the body. The procession itself is serious but chaotic and circuitous: the raised, highly ornamented sarcophagus must be spun around violently at all intersections in order to confuse evil spirits. The burning itself, where the soul ascends to await its next incarnation, follows this.

This Ngaben follows the same course, in ways that will be readily apparent. The two sections are fused together by a central kebyar, the highly charged, ametric-but-synchronous tutti which characterizes modern Balinese music.

Ironically, the term kebyar means ‘explosion,’ though it is normally described as a flower bursting into bloom, or a flash of lightning in the sky. Historically, kebyar arose in response to the violent takeover of Bali by the Dutch at the dawn of the 20th century; that tragedy thus sparked a renaissance of art and cross-cultural exchange on the island which has lasted until this day. This piece, a response to the violence which starts this century, is a small offering in the hope that the east-west exchange will continue undaunted.

Kebyar Kebyar (2002) - Balinese Gamelan Gong Kebyar - 7'

Balinese gamelan gong kebyar

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Amok! (1996) - Balinese Gamelan Gong Kebyar, db (or vc), perc, kbyd - 32'

six movements for Balinese gamelan, double bass (or cello), percussion sampler, keyboard sampler

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INSTRUMENTATION
Amplified Bass (or Cello) w/distortion, delay & harmonizer
Amplified Keyboard sampler (88-key, touch sensitive) w/delay
Amplified Percussion sampler (12-pad, touch sensitive) w/delay
Balinese gamelan gong kebyar in saih selisir (5-tone pelog) tuning: 3-6 suling, 4 reong, 1 ugal, 4 pemade, 4 kantil, 2 jublag (+ 2 optional penyecah), 2 jegogan, 1-2 kendang, 1 ceng-ceng, 1 kempli, 1 gong (agung-kempur-kemong)

PROGRAM NOTES by the composer

Amok! is one of the few common English language words taken directly from Malay/Indonesian. The others are 'ketchup' (soy sauce) and 'orangutan (forest person), and neither seemed to suit this piece. When I wrote it, in 1996, real-time processing and nimble sample manipulation were just coming into their own, and I sought to explore the contrast between the endless possibilities of electronics - where any sound is possible if you can only figure out how to make it - and the 'rooted in the real'-ness of the gamelan - its finite 5-toned scale emitting an infinity of overtones and sonic richness . This contrast governs the piece, with the sampler using only the sounds of the gamelan, transposed and uprooted to create new melodic and harmonic possibilities. A melody starts in a pentatonic gamelan and winds up somewhere else; a rhythm moves to the bass and is then overlaid with digital effects - delays and harmonizations - to create something else entirely, each element recontextualizing the other.

Amok! was commissioned by ReadersDigest/Meet the Composer, for Gamelan Galak Tika and Basso Bongo (Robert Black, bass, and Amy Knoles, percussion)

First performance: May 10, 1997, Kresge Auditorium, Cambridge, MA - Gamelan Galak Tika and Basso Bongo
Recording: Gamelan Galak Tika (New World) 2000 - Gamelan Galak Tika, Evan Ziporyn, director; Robert Black, bass; Dan Schmidt, keyboard sampler

Tire Fire (1994) - Balinese Gamelan Gong Kebyar, 2 e-gtr, e-bass, kybd - 25'

Balinese gamelan, two electric guitars, electric bass, and keyboard (or mandolin)

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Tire Fire was originally written for Gamelan Sekar Jaya but has since become Galak Tika'a anthem. Combining traditional gamelan instruments with a battery of western technology (2 guitars, bass,and keyboard), the work is both an examination and celebration of cultural diversity. Kaleidoscopically blending tuning systems, playing techniques, and formal ideas from west and east (i.e., interlocking parts and metric modulations), the piece ranges in feel from archaic Balinese dance forms such as gandrung to Grateful Dead jams. As ethnomusicologist Marc Perlman put it "what you hear will depend on where you are sitting in cultural space."

Aneh Tapi Nyata (1992) - Chamber Ensemble & Mixed Gamelan Ensemble - 14'

chamber ensemble and Balinese percussion

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Instrumentation:
European instruments: female voice, flute, clarinet, bass clarinet. electric guitar. 2 electric mandolins, violin, cello, triangle
Balinese instruments: reong (pelog), gender wayang (slendro), tingklet (joged slendro), ceng-ceng, kempli, 3 gongs, 2 kendang, preferably legong size

PROGRAM NOTES by the composer

Aneh Tapi Nyata was composed for Gamelan Sekar Jaya, on the occasion of their second tour to Bali in 1992. I had recently left the group to move east, and only on leaving did I realize what an extraordinary thing it was to have Americans devote themselves so passionately to another culture. I felt it important that the group show itself to the Balinese, in all our ragtag, hybrid splendor. Instrumentation was dictated by whoever was around and whatever they could play, at whatever skill level (the violinist, for example, had an extremely firm command of the open strings). I compensated for tuning and genre discrepancies by highlighting them: the gamelan instruments are also taken from a variety of ensembles in a variety of intonations.

Aneh Tapi Nyata was commissioned by Gamelan Sekar Jaya with the support of the Rockefeller Multi-Arts Program. It was premiered at the Marin Community Center in May 1992 and at the Bali International Arts Festival in July.

LYRICS by Evan Ziporyn

Apa arti dunia ini?
Mengembara, cari jamu pantas tamu untuk mengobatkan ngeri...
Zaman kami hilang tradisi - mana beli?
Kalau bisa, minta sisah dari banten masih asli...
Baru tiba membuka kopor saya - di dalam, selalu soal ikut jalan
Aneh tapi nyata
Lagu barat dinyanyi diiringi campuran begini...
Berkumpul sampai terpisah - sementara peleburan
Manis asam, terserah penonton

(What is the meaning of it all?
Wander around, look for a tonic fit for a foreigner to cure anxiety...
Our era has lost all tradition - where can it be bought?
If I may, I ask for the leftovers from still-authentic offerings...
Newly arrived I open my suitcase - inside, all my problems have come along
Strange but true
A western song accompanied by this mixture...
Gather together until forced apart - a momentary fusion
Sweet or sour, it's up to the listener)

Kekembangan (1990) - Balinese Gamelan Gong Kebyar & Sax 4tet - 16'

(in collaboration with I Nyoman Windha)
saxophone quartet and Balinese gamelan

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PROGRAM NOTES

Kekembangan (1990) is based on I Nyoman Windha’s Kembang Pencak, a piece for Balinese gong kebyar which accompanies choreography by I Nyoman Catra. Kembang Pencak was based in both movement and sound on pencak silat, a Balinese martial art. For Kekembangan Ziporyn and Windha replaced the dancer/singers with saxophone quartet. The original piece is played in its entirety, overlaid with new material, and with certain sections (notably Part Four) expanded. It was premiered in April 1990 in Berkeley, California by Gamelan Sekar Jaya with saxophonists Randy McKean, Chris Jonas, Evan Ziporyn, and Dan Plonsey. It was performed two months later at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco, and then not performed again until October 2019, when Kurt Doles revived it for the Bowling Green Festival of New Music.

Night Bus (1990) - Sundanese Gamelan - 12'

Sundanese gamelan (commisioned by the Toronto Border Crossings Festival for the Evergreen Club)

Works for Theater/Opera

Brother of Jackals (Skin for Skin) (2016-19) in progress

opera based on the Book of Job

A House in Bali (2009) 90'

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opera based on the memoir of Colin McPhee, for amplified sextet (gtr, perc, pno, vln, vc, cb), Balinese gamelan, two tenors, one soprano, and four Balinese actors/dancers

Oedipus Rex (2004) 90''

Greek choruses and onstage incidental music the American Repertory Theater production of the original Sophocles tragedy. Directed by Robert Woodruff, Loeb Theater, Cambridge, MA

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ShadowBang (2001) 90'

full-length theater work for Balinese dalang (shadow puppeteer) and Bang on a Can Allstars.
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Also available: Music From Shadowbang (Suite for Chamber Ensemble) & Scenes from Shadowbang (Viola & Piano)

SYNOPSIS:

Shadow Bang is a theater piece combining aspects of Balinese traditional shadow puppetry with western stage design and music. Like all Balinese wayang, it is based the Hindu epics, in this case a very tangential episode from the Ramayana. In keeping with tradition, Pak Wija embellishes and digresses, creating stories within stories and focusing on Balinese folk characters who have been inserted into the original Indian story over the years. While the gods and heroes of Hindu mythology sing and speak in stylized Kawi language, the Balinese characters - Twalen, Merdah, Sangut and Delam - speak in everyday language (in this case, English) and serve as a bridge between the cosmic and the mundane.

1) Head 1 - Overture
2) Head 2/Scene 1 - the brothers Sangut and Delam philosophize and insult one another while waiting for their master, the demon Dundhubhi.
3) Angkat - Dunhdubhi's army goes forth, seeking suitable enemies to conquer.
4) Ocean - Arriving at water’s edge, the brothers stand in awe, waiting for Dundhubhi to challenge the Ocean itself to battle. Ocean declines the challenge: its liquid form and ebb-and-flow make it too passive. It suggests Mountain as a more worthy opponent, and the demon departs.
5) Meditasi/Pesta Raksasa - A hermit wanders atop the mountain, preparing to meditate. He is interrupted by Dunhdubhi’s army, who throw a party. Mountain also refuses battle, claiming immobility, and sends Dundhubhi to fight Subali, the Monkey King.
6) Frogs (I Wayan Wija) - Sounds of the forest, a solo chorus by Pak Wija.
7) Forest/Tari Subali/Quiet Battle/Loud Battle/Priest's Curse - Twalen and his son Merdah , servants to the Monkey King, cavort with various animals while waiting for Subali’s arrival. Subali dances, and Dundhubhi challenges him to battle. The demon and monkey do battle in various incarnations; Subali finally vanquishes Dundhubhi, casting his body atop the sacred mountain. Priest Matanga, caretaker of the mountain, curses Subali for despoiling his land.
8) Tabuh Gari - the story ends, the puppets are purified and go home.

The creation of Shadow Bang was made possible in part with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and the generous support of the Rockefeller Foundation. The premiere was co-sponsored by the MIT Office for the Arts, Music and Theater Arts, and MassMoca. The recording was made possible by a grant from the Aaron Copland Foundation. personnel:

Works for Orchestra

GYMNOPEDIES XYZ – 3 movements (2017) – 18’ (6’6’6’)

Erik Satie, recomposed by Evan Ziporyn

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3 movements for orchestra Approximate length: 18 minutes
01 GYMNOPEDIE X (6’) 02 GYMNOPÉDIE Y (6’) 03 GYMNOPÉDIE Z (6’)
2 Flutes
2 Oboes
2 Clarinets in B-flat (one doubling bass clarinet)
2 Bassoons
2 Horns in F
2 Trumpets in C
Trombone
Bass Trombone
3 Percussion
1: Vibraphone, Crotales, Resonant Cymbal, Tam-tam, Cymbals
2: Glockenspiel, Resonant Cymbal, Tam-tam, Marimba
3: Vibraphone
Harp
Piano/Electric Piano
Strings min 2-2-2-2-2

NOTES by EVAN ZIPORYN
GYMNOPÉDIES XYZ is a second-generation ambient re-imagining of Erik Satie’s Trois Gymnopédies (1888, 1895). It builds on Claude Debussy’s 1897 arrangements (of #1 & #3) and Branden Landis (as Hey Exit)’s 2016 Every Recording of Gymnopedie 1.

01 Gymnopédie X is a canon at the measure, based closely on Debussy’s orchestration of #1. Debussy considered #2 ‘unsuitable’ for orchdstration, so 02 Gymnopédie Y ‘does the opposite,’ focusing on instruments that he omitted from his orchestration: clarinets, trumpets, and percussion (pitched and unpitched). The canon is shortened by one-beat, creating cross-rhythms and slow hemiolae that gradually overwhelm the texture. 03 Gymnopédie Z eliminates shared pulse altogether and expands to the entire orchestra, effectively creating a 30-80 voice micro-canon, depending on the size of the ensemble.

Tabla Concerto: Mumbai (2011) - Tabla, Percussion, Strings (3 MVTS) - 35'

3 movements - solo tabla, 4 percussion, strings (min 4.4.3.3.2)

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Mumbai was commissioned by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project with the support of Meet the Composer/Commissioning USA
First performance:May 27, 2011, Jordan Hall, Boston, Sandeep Das, soloist, Gil Rose, conductor

Hard Drive (2007) - Large Orchestra - 18'

large orchestra with electric guitar - one movement

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Instrumentation: Piccolo, 2 Flutes, 2 Oboes, English Horn, 2 Clarinets in B-flat, 1 Bass clarinet in B-flat, 2 Bassoons, 1 Contrabassoon, 4 Horns, 3 Trumpets in B-flat, 2 Trombones, 1 Bass Trombone, 1 Tuba
Percussion 1: Bass Drum, 2 Congas, Cowbell, Glockenspiel, Guiro, Shaker, Suspended Cymbal, 2 Toms, 5 Woodblocks
Percussion 2: Bass Drum, Chinese Cymbal, Congas, Cowbell, Glockenspiel, Tambourine, Tam-tam, 5 Temple Blocks, 2 Toms
2 Drum Kits, Timpani, Harp, Electric Guitar w/compression/sustain, distortion, and volume pedal
Strings (mininum 8/8/8/8/3): Violin I ABCD, Violin II ABCD, Viola ABCD, Violoncello ABCD, Bass

Commissioned by Bank of America Celebrity Series for Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project; premiered May 19, 2007, Sanders Theater, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Bayu Sabda Idep (2007) - Str Orch & Mixed Gamelan Ensemble - 27'

Just Intonation slendro chamber gamelan and chamber string orchestra

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Instrumentation:
Pelog Balinese trompong or reong (in approximate ISI tuning, notated C#-ding D-dong E-deng G#-dung A-dang)
8 custom designed 'Beta Gamelan' gender (2 kantil, 2 pemade, 2 jublag, 2 jegogan, notated F#-dong A-deng B-dung C#-dang E-ding, designated ‘high/low’ for pengisep/pengumbang divisi)
Balinese gong set: wadon, lanang, kempur, kenong
Balinese kendang kebyar
Strings (minimum 4-4-3-3-1), tuned approximately to A=443 (i.e., 12 cents sharp)

PROGRAM NOTES BY THE COMPOSER:
Bayu Sabda Idep (Energy Voice Idea) comprise the Balinese concept of 'Tri Premane' (3 life forces), which together distinguish humanity from plants (who have life-energy but no voice) and animals (who have energy and voice but no abstract thought). The ability to control, balance, and project these forces is understood by the Balinese to be the distinguishing mark of great performers, particularly the great shadow-puppet masters or dalang. This piece is in three large sections, which in turn emphasize one of these forces. The first movement, Idep, builds on an exoskeletal formal architecture; the second, Bayu, is propelled by rhythmic motion; the third, Sabda, simply sings. I wrote the piece in the wake of the death of my teacher, the great gender wayang master I Wayan Loceng, with whom I studied in the late 1980s. An unrelentingly demanding teacher, Pak Wayan's musical virtuosity was matched by his knowledge of the wayang (shadow play) itself, and it was said that he had had a hand in the training of all the great dalang of Sukawati Village, the center of puppetry in Bali, where he lived his entire life. A dalang is a revered, quasi-religious figure in Bali; his musicians 'follow' him for a fraction of his wages and little or no personal recognition. Pak Wayan thus spent much of his performing career in the shadow of his own students, but more importantly in the service of an ancient art-form that was far more important to him than renown or wealth. I began this piece around the same time I learned of his death, and I felt his presence continually, not in a literal sense but in a compulsion to compose a work that would reflect his human and artistic values.

Most of the Balinese instruments in this piece were custom-made for this project and are non-traditional in tuning and design. Traditional Balinese instruments are tuned in distinctive, non-tempered scales which only match western tuning by coincidence. I have written for these wonderfully unwieldy bi-cultural combinations for many years, but in this piece I wanted something else: a tuning that would allow for the possibility of harmonization and consonance with western instruments while still having a distinctive, non-tempered character. The tuning I designed is an attempt to 'square the circle' - combining the basic structure of the Balinese slendro scale with principles of just intonation, that is, simple intervallic ratios, and centering the tones on a more-or-less precisely tuned 'A'. (I say more-or-less because the end result was slightly different than that which I had specified, but it sounded so good that we retained it!). Thus the melodies and harmonies constantly move in and out of the realm of the recognizable over the course of the piece. The instruments were built by Pande Made Sukerta of Blahbatuh. The project as a whole is the brainchild of Karl Middleman, who called me out of the blue and bravely went along with the whole scheme.

Bayu Sabda Idep was commissioned by the New Philadelphia Classical Symphony - Karl Middleman, Artistic Director - as part of its 'Gateways to Global Music' series, and is made possible through the generous support of the Philadelphia Music Project, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, and administered by the University of the Arts. Premier performances are April 20 and 21, 2007 at the Trinity Life Center and Westtown School, respectively.

Big Grenadilla (2006) - Bs Clar & Chamber Orchestra - 15'

Concerto for bass clarinet and chamber orchestra: solo bc/1.1.1.1/1.1.1.1/3 perc/pno/hp/strgs min 4-4-3-2-2

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PROGRAM NOTES by the composer:
Big Grenadilla was commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra, with myself as soloist. The concerto is traditionally a heroic form, which doesn’t jibe well with an egalitarian approach to music. But given the chance to be at stage front amid New York’s finest musicians, it would be foolish to squander the occasion. “Big Grenadilla” is my second bass clarinet/large ensemble work: five years ago, I composed and performed “Drill,” for bass clarinet and wind ensemble, casting myself in the role of drill sergeant, leading the troops through a vigorous basic training. But in this work, among colleagues, the soloist and conductor are first among equals, leading a boisterous band, er, orchestra.

Bass clarinet is the instrument I know best, thrust into my hands in high school, and never far from me since. Musicians and their instruments, in hand and mouth, mind and body: metaphors come quickly. It’s a life partner, and I write for it as I would write for another musician, ideally using my music to reveal the instrument’s own physical and spiritual character. Of course this is ventriliqual, the story I tell myself. In practical terms, the vocabulary of the music is contoured to the acoustic characteristics of the horn, rather than the other way around.

Grenadilla is a dense, strong dark wood that is often mistaken for ebony. It continues to grow in abundance on the African steppe. It is the primary wood for many instruments, including the bass clarinet, whose bottom joint alone is a single piece 30 inches in length. Big grenadilla, yearning for its living, rooted reality, with the orchestra providing the dreamscape.

Big Grenadilla was premiered in Carnegie's Zankel Hall. 60 years earlier, in that same building, Woody Herman premiered Stravinsky’s pocket-sized “Ebony Concerto”. Title aside, I claim no conscious connection to this masterpiece, but simply bow my head in homage. It is the Kilimanjaro of my own African landscape. We steppe-dwellers continue to gaze up in awe.

War Chant (2004) - Orchestra - 15'

orchestra with Hawaian-style lap-steel guitar

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Instrumentation
3 Flutes (one doubling Piccolo, one doubling Alto Flute)
2 Oboes
2 B-flat Clarinets
2 Bassoons
4 Horns in F
2 Trumpets in C
2 Tenor Trombones
1 Bass Trombone
Percussion 1: Timpani, 4 temple blocks, Sleigh bells, Chinese flat cymbal, Tambourine, Snare drum
Percussion 2: Sleigh bells, Guiro, 2 Bongos, Cowbell, Triangle, Snare drum, Bass drum, Glockenspiel
Percussion 3: Sleigh bells, Suspended Cymbal, Guiro, Tamtam, Crotales, Glockenspiel, Xylophone, Log Drum
Piano
Harp
Hawaiian Steel Guitar (w/slide)
Strings: minimum 8-8-6-6-3

Program notes by the composer:

We live in an age of war; sadly, we all know this now. The airport is the new battlefield and the jumbo jet the weapon of choice, so we are told, and so we believe. But this is really nothing new: the fear of death has always been a traveling companion. The screams of the machinery soothe us, and nothing is more terrifying than the wrong type of metallic scrape, knock, or, worst of all, silence. Recently, the US Airways shuttle from Logan to LaGuardia began force-feeding its passengers the Fox News Network, and it seemed clear to me that this was the perfect battle music for the new frontline.

I began this piece by recording a BOS-LGA shuttle flight, a symphony of mechanical accelerations, punctuated by the gentle beeps of the seatbelt sign and the reassurances and warnings of the flight attendant. The engine’s primal howl is subsumed by soothing corporate lyricism, and we probably wouldn’t be able to have it any other way. As will be apparent, the structure of War Chant is based on this necessary dialectic. As for the content, it concerns a similar musical opposition. On the one hand there is Xenakis, who speaks only the raw truth; on the other Juan Garcia Esquivel, master of pleasure and fantasy. I had a crazy dream of trying to write music that somehow paid homage to both, without compromise or irony. This is my attempt at that reconciliation.

War Chant was commissioned by the Catherine and Paul Buttenwieser Foundation for the Boston Modern Orchestra project, Gil Rose, conductor.

<Ngaben (for Sari Club) (2003) - Balinese Gamelan Gong Kebyar & Orchestra - 15'

Balinese gamelan & orchestra

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NOTES by the composer

A terrorist bomb destroyed the Sari Club in Kuta Beach, Bali on October 12, 2002. I had just begun working on a very different type of piece for gamelan and orchestra, but the printed images of Balinese women crying and praying at the blast site overwhelmed me and changed the direction of the music.

The ngaben cremation is the last and most important life ritual in Balinese Hinduism. Like a traditional New Orleans funeral, it encompasses a wide range of emotions. The entire village participates, preparations are extensive, and the overall mood is decidedly unmournful. The loss is acknowledged, but it is subsumed by the far more important task of releasing the soul from the body. The procession itself is serious but chaotic and circuitous: the raised, highly ornamented sarcophagus must be spun around violently at all intersections in order to confuse evil spirits. The burning itself, where the soul ascends to await its next incarnation, follows this.

This Ngaben follows the same course, in ways that will be readily apparent. The two sections are fused together by a central kebyar, the highly charged, ametric-but-synchronous tutti which characterizes modern Balinese music.

Ironically, the term kebyar means ‘explosion,’ though it is normally described as a flower bursting into bloom, or a flash of lightning in the sky. Historically, kebyar arose in response to the violent takeover of Bali by the Dutch at the dawn of the 20th century; that tragedy thus sparked a renaissance of art and cross-cultural exchange on the island which has lasted until this day. This piece, a response to the violence which starts this century, is a small offering in the hope that the east-west exchange will continue undaunted.

Frog's Eye (2002) - Orchestra 13'

Instrumentation: 2 flutes, oboe, English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 percussionists (claves, 2 temple blocks, bass drum, low tom, triangle, ‘chinese-type’ suspended cymbal, 2 bongos), strings (4-4-2-2-2)

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Commissioned and premiered by Boston Pro Arte Orchestra, Isiaiah Jackson,conductor, Strand Theater, Boston and Sanders Theater, Cambridge, October 2002

PROGRAM NOTES BY THE COMPOSER (2002):

“I’m quite convinced in some ways that the camera has given us a somewhat blinkered look. We’re looking at the world through a hole - we’re getting a bit of tunnel vision. And so I’m trying to widen it, trying to put in more than just looking ahead. And when you do, the viewer is pulled in more. So I get quite excited by that. I spent rather a long time experimenting with optics, and actually now my intention is to throw them away and use my two eyes and what I think of the world and look at it, look at the real world. I don’t watch television much, I look at the garden, that’s the real world I think, so that’s what I’m going to do.”
-David Hockney on NPR’s Weekend Edition, December 9, 2001

As a relative newcomer to New England (a mere 12 years), I still allow myself the luxury of being overwhelmed by local nature, specifically summer’s rampant fecundity. Swimming across lakes and ponds, the view is as with a camera obscura, one’s small humanity dwarfed by water and sky, ringed by innumerable trees and leaves. It’s hard to feel important at such moments, but also impossible not to feel wondrously alive. As it turns out, this is close to the frog’s-eye view: perched on rocks in shallow water, 99 percent immersed, only their huge panoptic eyes above the water line. Perfect stillness, perfect contemplation, patience, serenity, all that good Zen stuff. Keeping cool while maintaining absolute vigilance. They are in fact hard at work, staring intently, waiting for a moment of action and violence, for insects, for food. The view is incidental as far as they’re concerned.

Meanwhile, back among the humans, we live our directed lives, cutting across the sensory present, intersecting with it, ignoring it, misapprehending, misinterpreting. This is undoubtedly our own biological necessity. We strive for a certain type of awareness, for multilayered perception, and occasionally we get there, but we seem to be built for subjective narrative. We’ve got to catch the fly to survive. I personally don’t have a problem with this, but – like Mr. Hockney – I’m trying to look at my surroundings while still advancing the story line.

Filling Station (1986) 12'

orchestra premiered by UC Berkeley Symphony, EZ conductor, October 1986

Pleasureville, Pain City (1985) 6'

premiered by UC Berkeley Symphony, John Sackett, conductor, February 1985

Works for Wind Ensemble

Impulse Control (2019) - Cto for Drum Set & Wind Ens - 2 mvts 18'

for drum set and wind ensemble

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INSTRUMENTATION: Solo drum set, 3fl.3ob.4cl.1bc.2bsn.1cbsn.4sx.4hn.3tpt.2euph.2trb.1btrb.1tub.1ep.1hp.1db.5perc.

PROGRAM NOTE by the composer

Drum set players are the only musicians who regularly sit on a ‘throne’ – a small, adjustable 3-legged stool. The drum set gets its own room in a recording studio, usually airless and cramped, with a window just big enough to see the other musicians, aka the ‘isolation booth,’ but private real estate nonetheless. In other words, the singular status of the drum set – in every musical setting– is unquestioned, certainly by drummers. And I agree with them. Like many composers nowadays I write drum set parts into any and everything I’m allowed to, in orchestra pieces, wind ensemble works, even two operas. If the drummer rocks, the piece rocks, or, more precisely, if the drummer doesn’t, the piece cannot.

A drum set (drum-set? drumkit? trap set? can we come to consensus here?) is – literally and by lineage – a one-man percussion ensemble, and yet that very lineage – the ongoing innovations and virtuosic advancements of 20th and 21st century drum gods and goddesses, who collectively inspired Impulse Control – has gradually but unquestionably established the drum set as its own instrumental species, or at least genus: not just a set of drums and cymbals, different from a particular percussion set-up: a drum set, played from a throne.

More than an extremely efficient configuration, the drum set is the embodiment of time, groove and cycle – 3 good things to center a piece of music around. In Impulse Control the soloist is backed by five fellow percussionists, whose parts are generated by his initial Big Bangs: doubling, echoing, replicating, transforming, gradually coalescing into more orderly solar systems of polyrhythmic harmonies, from which a heterophony of melodies emerge. The cycles begin to interrupt themselves, and eventually the interruptions themselves become the cycles.

‘Impulse control’ is a very ambiguous phrase, from two words that themselves have multiple, contradictory meanings. Is an impulse by definition that which we cannot control, an urge, a desire, whether we act on it or not? Or is it the thing that controls us, the motivating force behind it all? In physics the impetus is irrelevant: an ‘impulse’ is anything that forces a change in momentum. In audio engineering ‘impulse response’ (IR) is an indispensable tool in acoustic design and recording production, but the impulse itself – that which generates the IR is, as it turns out, an impossibility, an idealization, an infinite set of frequencies over an infinitesimally short span of time. Drums and cymbals – ‘non-pitched,’ because they have too much pitch content – do a good job of functioning as all of the above.

Impulse Control is a companion piece to Mumbai, a tabla concerto I wrote for Sandeep Das in 2009, and which Dan Piccolo performed brilliantly for his doctoral recital in Ann Arbor in 2015. Dan is the real ‘impulse’ behind the piece; he is also ‘Control,’ in all senses and meanings of the words. My deep gratitude also to the Kurt Doles, Kenneth Thompson, MACCM, BGSU Wind Symphony, and all the Consortium members.

First performance October 17, 2019, 7:30 pm – Bowling Green State University, 40th Annual Bowling Green New Music Festival
Dan Piccolo, soloist; BGSU Wind Symphony, Kenneth Thompson, Director

The Ornate Zither and the Nomad Flute (2005) - Soprano Voice & Wind Ens 15'

for solo soprano and wind ensemble

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To poems by Li Shangyin and W.S. Merwin

Instrumentation: Soprano voice, Piccolo, Flute, Flute/Alto Flute, 2 Oboes, 2 B-flat Clarinets, 2 B-flat Bass Clarinets 2 Bassoons, 2 B-flat Soprano Saxophones 2 F Horns, 2 B-flat Trumpets, Trombone, Bass Trombone, Euphonium, Tuba, Percussion Battery (4 players): Crotales (bowed and struck), Vibraphone (bowed and struck), 2 cymbals, high hat, maracas, sleigh bells, cowbell, Electric Piano (amplified) Double Bass (amplified)

The Nomad Flute
By W.S. Merwin (b. 1927)

You that sang to me once sing to me now let me hear your long lifted note
survive with me
the star is fading

I can think farther than that but I forget do you hear me

do you still hear me does your air
remember you
oh breath of morning night song morning song I have with me

all that I do not know I have lost none of it

but I know better now
than to ask you
where you learned that music where any of it came from once there were lions in China
I will listen until the flute stops and the light is old again
-WS Merwin

The Nomad Flute was originally published in the New Yorker magazine, November 22, 2004. It is used with kind permission of the magazine and the author.

The Ornate Zither and the Nomad Flute was commissioned for the MIT Wind Ensemble, Fred Harris, director, by Richard Nordlof, MIT Class of 1955, in loving memory of his wife Jody. It was premiered by soprano Anne Harley and MITWE at Kresge Auditorium, Cambridge, MA, on March 11 2005.

Drill (2002) - Bs Clar & Wind Ens - 10'

Concerto for bass clarinet and wind ensemble: solo bc/pic, 2 fl, 2 ob, 2 cl, 1 bc, 2 bsn, cbsn, ssax, asax, tsax, bsax, 4 hn, 4 trpt, 3 trb, 1 btrb, 1 euph, 1 tuba, 1 cb, 5 perc

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PROGRAM NOTES BY THE COMPOSER:
The concerto form springs from romanticism: its default metaphor is that of the heroic individual, emerging from and exalted by his fellow man. This is not really my thing, but I do have a strong desire to make music with my wind brethren, to do things on our instruments together. Having taught for over a decade, I am also conscious of the complex ways in which teachers and students relate, and this piece reflects this, at least in my mind. In war movies and sitcoms, it's always struck me that the drill sergeant works at least as hard as the recruits, running alongside, exhorting and cajoling to be sure, but never really asking them to do things he himself couldn't or wouldn't do. Not that that necessarily has anything to do with the title of this piece, I just thought I'd mention it. Drill is the first of a projected three-movement work, written for Fred Harris and the MIT Wind Ensemble.

commissioned by the MIT Wind Ensemble, Fred Harris, director

Tsmindao Ghmerto (1995) - Solo Bs Cl & Wind Ens - 7'

solo bass clarinet and wind ensemble
commissioned and premiered by Nederlands Blazers, New Years Day 1996
This ensemble version of Tsmindao Ghmerto is available in print edition only. For more information contact info@airplaneears.com
The solo bass clarinet version can be heard here:

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PROGRAM NOTES BY THE COMPOSER:
Tsmindao Ghmerto is based on Zakaria Paliashvili’s (1871-1933) stunning setting of the hymn of the same name, a Sanctus from the liturgy of the Georgian Orthodox Church. To replicate 3-part choral harmony on the bass clarinet, an instrument generally regarded as monophonic, the soloist is asked to hum perfectly tuned drone notes into the instrument almost continuously throughout the piece. Intonation is much more important than volume, particularly in the hummed part – it doesn’t have to be as loud as the sound of the bass clarinet itself. If the notes are in tune, whatever their volume, the original harmonies will not only be felt but will be enhanced by overtones and other aural artifacts, expected and unexpected, any and all of which are desirable.

Please also be mindful of the lyrics of the original, which are:

Tsmindao Ghmerto	Holy God
Tsmindao Zliero	Holy mighty
Tsmindao Ukvdao	Holy immortal
Shegvitskalen chven.	Have mercy on us

The hummed ‘vocal’ line is indicated on a separate staff but to be done by the same player, much like the left hand in a piano part. It is transposed to B-flat so that the performer can more easily conceptualize the intervallic relationships between the two parts.

The solo version of Tsmindao Ghmerto was recorded by Evan Ziporyn and released as part of Bang on a Can: Cheating, Lying, Stealing (Sony Classical, 1996). Subsequently re-released on Bang on a Can Classics (Cantaloupe Music, 2002).

Tsmindao Ghmerto is based on a hymn of the same name from the liturgy of the Georgian Orthodox Church, as recorded by the Rustavi Choir for the Nonesuch label. The resemblance is so strong that I originally billed it as an arrangement, until several people took issue with this, in public and private. The bass clarinetist is required to hum into the instrument almost continuously throughout the piece. The ‘vocal’ line is indicated on a separate staff but is to be done by the same player, much like the left hand in a piano part. It is transposed to B-flat so that the player can more easily conceptualize the intervallic relationships between the two parts There are undoubtedly various ways to produce tones while humming, but in all cases the effect should be as graceful as possible, that is, it shouldn’t seem like a struggle. Other sound artifacts that may emerge while singing and playing are desirable.

Houtman's Men in Buleleng (1994) - SMALL WIND ENS - 11'

picc, sop sax, 2 alto sax, 1 hn, 3 trpt, 2 trb, 1 btrb, 1 pno, 1 e-bass

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for Orkest de Volharding, premiered at Ijsbreker, Amsterdam, early 1995

Works for Chamber Ensembles

Air = Water (2019) - String 4tet & Gamelan 4tet - 13"

String Quartet & Gamelan Quartet: 2 Movements (Ombak=Waves, Hujan=Rain)

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Commissioned by Network for New Music, Philadelphia
Completed February 2, 2019; Revised April 2019 & July 2020
First performance April 7, 2019, by Network for New Music (Thomas Schuttenhelm, Artistic Director) featuring Gamelan Semara Santi (Thomas Whitman, director)

By The Numbers (2017) - Clar/Bs Cl, Vln, Piano - 2 Mvts - 14"

Clarinet/Bass Clarinet, Violin, Retuned Piano - 2 movements: Discordion, Concordia

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PROGRAM NOTES BY THE COMPOSER:

By The Numbers was written in homage to Lou Harrison, on the occasion of his centennial, and was premiered at ICA Boston on October 12, 2017, Johnny Gandelsman, violin; Sarah Cahill, piano; myself on clarinet and bass clarinet. In the original version, the piano needs to be tuned to the unique and complex just intonation scale required to perform Lou's Concerto for Piano w/Javanese Gamelan with his own Si Betty instruments. So, as the title suggests, the piece is indelibly link to Lou's music 'by the numbers:' by design, it walks in Lou's footprints.

The radical tuning of the piano presents delights and challenges: deeper consonances and weirder dissonances. For By The Numbers I approach these as a dialectic: the first movement, Discordion, delights in the dissonances; the second, Concordia, revels in the consonances.

String Quartet #4: Qi (2014) - 3 MVTS - 22'

string quartet; 3 mvts (Lucid Flight, Garden, Transport)

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Program notes by the composer:

The string quartet always makes me think in elemental terms - perhaps the combination of the repertoire, the instruments themselves, and the intense intimacy with which groups like Brooklyn Rider work together. So while many of my pieces have programmatic titles and/or narrative content, my string quartets tend to focus on forces of nature: water (Eel Bone), breath (Breathing Space), and now qi, the traditional Chinese character for life-force, a concept as ubiquitous and difficult to precisely define as analogous principles in all cultures and religions. Gaining awareness of and control over qi is a central, lifelong pursuit in many meditative and martial practices, including tai chi and qigong. In my own experience, it seems that even in everyday life there are certain heightened states in which all of us become aware of qi flow - dreams of flying, repose with nature, and those rare moments in which intense engagement with something or someone allows us to briefly 'break on through to the other side.' The three movements of Qi - Lucid Flight, Garden, and Transport - are inspired by these moments.

Qi was commissioned by Mike Kong & Christine Bulawa; it is dedicated to the members of Brooklyn Rider, who premiered and recorded it.

Eviyan Songbook (2013) - - Cl, Gtr, Voice/Violin - 25'

clarinet, guitar, voice/violin - 5 lead sheets from the repertoire of Eviyan Trio (Iva Bittova, Gyan Riley, Evan Ziporyn)

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CONTENTS:
Kebyar Blues
Odd Meeting
Paper Cone
Pygmyesque
Sun Shower

Project for a Revolution in New York (2013) - Septet - 26’

flute/alto flute, clarinet/bass clarinet, bass clarinet, piano, percussion, violin, cello
4 mvts - with optional accompanying films by Christine Southworth
commissioned and premiered by Santieri Salveggi

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Atlas (2012) - Clar, Sarod, Voice, Dancer - 6"

clarinet, sarod, voice, kathak dancer
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Three Nyatitis (2012) - Clarinet, Viola, Banjo 15'

banjo, clarinet (in A & B-flat), viola - 3 movements
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commissioned by Roger Michel, first performance Muthaiga Club, Nairobi, Kenya, 2012; first US performance, Odd Fellows Club, Boston, 2012

100 30' Pieces for 2 Pianos (2011) - 2 Pnos 4 Hds 50'

2 pianos, 4 hands

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NOTES by the composer:

These pieces were written during the very cold month of January 2011; Christine Southworth also wrote a matching set at the same time. The title is literal: each piece (in both sets) is exactly 30 seconds long. The set can be performed in its entirety or broken up into smaller subsets/suites.

Where Was I? (2008) - Percussion, Cello, Piano - 15'-25'

4 movements for cello, piano, percussion

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PERCUSSION BATTERY: bongo, claves, congas (2), rainstick, shaker, temple block, timbale, vibraphone, woodblock, drum kit (bd, hh, sn, 3 cymb)

WHERE WAS I can be played in its entirety (25 minutes) or in a shortened (15 minute), reordered version, omitting the 4th movement and switching the sequence to Movements 1, 3, and ending with 2.

WHERE WAS I was composed for the Real Quiet Trio (David Cossin, percussion; Felix Fan, cello; Andrew Russo, piano) and the Misnomer Dance Company, Chris Elam, director. It accompanied Chris Elam’s ballet Zipper, premiering at New York’s Joyce Soho Studio Theater in December, 2008.

Hive (2007) - Clar 4tet - 17'

clarinet quartet - 2 clarinets, 2 bass clarinets

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PROGRAM NOTES BY THE COMPOSER:
Hive grows out of my experience as an amateur beekeeper, in both sound and structure. Honeybee society predates our own, and in many ways the encounter with the apis is like encountering extraterrestrials, full of shocking similarities and profound differences. Hive is not strictly programmatic, but it does contain elements that come directly out of this encounter. For example, happy bees seem to vibrate a collective "A"; when agitated, this rises to a "C": this is the source of the opening oscillations in the music. The overall shape of the piece - swirls and flight patterns, frenzied accruals, followed by a long, zen-like stasis - mirrors the larger life-cycle of the hive, where the summer's buzz of activity is followed by a unique quasi-hibernation, the throng bundling together for warmth and protection, patiently vibrating their way through the winter. Recording the piece in frozen Minnesota during January, this seemed especially apt.

Commissioned by the University of Minnesota, Duluth for Theodore Schoen

Speak, At-man! (2006) - Alto Flute & Piano - 10'

alto flute and piano - single movement

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Sulvasutra (2006) - String 4tet, Tabla, Pipa - 18'

string quartet, pipa, and tabla - 3 movements: Ka, Agni, Letter to Pythagoras (3/4/5)
commissioned by the Silk Road Project, Yo-yo Ma, director

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Belle Labs (2006) - Cl, Vln, Robot - 20'

violin, clarinet, and robotic xylophone (Heliphon)

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commissioned by Ensemble Robot and Boston Museum of Science, premiered January 25, 2005 by Evan Ziporyn and Todd Reynolds

Thread (2005) - Cl, A.Fl, Vln, Cello - 25'

clarinet, alto and bass flute, violin, cello - one movement

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commissioned and premiered by Dinosaur Annex, Cambridge, MA June 2005

String Quartet #3: Breathing Space (2003) - 3 MVTS -25'

three movements for string quartet: Breathing Space (8'), No Return(8'), Night Sit (7')

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Notes by the composer:

Stravinsky asserted that his music expressed nothing, but the Buddha said the same thing in the Heart Sutra. Music at its root bridges the abstract and the concrete - we turn the sounds and rhythms of our lives into the architecture of thought; we sound it out and meditate on the result. The emotional resonance (when it happens) rightfully remains a mystery. When I write I try to visualize the ideal players performing: it's not enough to hear it, I want to feel the friction of the bow and see the movement of the body, and when I write for strings I always see Ethel in my mind. These three movements all have their roots in programmatic contexts, but all belong to this quartet. "Breathing Space" was coaxed out of me by director Janet Sonnenberg to open her deconstructed "Hamlet"; "No Return" and "Night Sit" come out of the multidisciplinary "Salmon River Project," as commissioned by the Sun Valley Center for the Arts. They are dedicated to my father.

Breathing Space was premiered by Ethel (Todd Reynolds and Mary Rowell, violins, Ralph Farris, viola, Dorothy Lawsom, cello) at Columbia University’s Miller Theater, April 2003

No Return (2002) - Clarinet, Violin & Fixed Media 30'

4 movements for violin, clarinet, and sounds of the Salmon River: Postcard, Upstream, No Return, Night Sit

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No Return: River Impressions 2002 was commissioned by the Sun Valley Center for the Arts as part of the Whole Salmon Exhibition. This commission was made possibly by generous gifts from Katherine Abelson and the Jeri L. Waxenberg Foundation. The first performance took place in Ketchum, Idaho in January 2003, with Todd Reynolds, violin, and the composer on clarinet.

More Songs About Telephones and Dogs (2002) - 11 Players - 25'

4 movements for 11 players - 2 cl, barisax, trpt, trb, pno, drumkit, perc, vln, vc, cb
Iris in Furs (5:45), Jubilee of Indifference (3:30), No Messages (8:00), Dog Heaven (6:30)

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MORE SONGS ABOUT TELEPHONES AND DOGS was commissioned by The Kitchen, NYC, for the House Blend series. It was premiered in December, 2002 by an ensemble directed by the composer. It is dedicated to Iris (1988-2002).

WARGASARI (2012) – SEXTET & FIXED AUDIO (6’)

for amplified sextet and fixed audio media
Clarinet in B-flat
Violoncello
Drum Kit
Electric Guitar
Electric Piano
Acoustic Bass



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PROGRAM NOTES by the composer
Wargasari (sextet version) was commissioned by Lincoln Center and the Barbican Centre; it was premiered by Bang on a Can All-stars at Alice Tully Hall, New York, NY April 28, 2012.
Wargasari is inspired by and includes in its entirety a 1928 recording of the same name by Balinese vocalist Ni Lemon & the Janger Abian Timbul Ensembled (remastered by World Arbiter Records and used with their permission). The piece consists of three overlaid elements, played simultaneously 1) a quartet (drum kit, electric guitar, electric piano, and acoustic bass) who begin the piece and play through the ‘rhythm score’ at the marked steady tempo.
2) The 1928 recording, with each phrase separated by silences, which must be triggered either by an ensemble member or a third party (audio engineer, etc.). Alternatively, a single recording with fixed expanded silences between phrases can be used – both versions can be obtained by contacting Airplane Ears Music: info@airplaneearsmusic.com
3) A duo (cello and clarinet) who ‘trace’ the recording at their own tempo (the ‘melody score’). Consequently, there is no single score of Wargasari, but rather two scores which never align in precisely the same way. The ‘melody score’ must start after the ‘rhythm score’ and end before it; never after.

MUSIC FROM SHADOWBANG (2001) – AMPLIFIED SEXTET – 4 MOVEMENTS (13’:3’,4’,3’,3’)

Total length @13’ 1) Angkat (3’) 2) Ocean (4’) 3) Meditasi (3’) 4) Head (3’)
aka “SUITE FROM SHADOWBANG”
INSTRUMENTATION
Clarinet in B-flat
Electric Guitar
Piano
Percussion
Woodblocks (at least two)
Glockenspiel
3 Balinese gongs (agung, kempur, kenong) or samples Drum Kit
Cello
Bass
All instruments may be amplified


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PROGRAM NOTES by the composer
This Suite is a self-contained set of instrumental pieces from the theater piece ShadowBang, a collaboration between myself, Balinese shadow puppeteer I Wayan Wija, and director Paul Schick. ShadowBang draws on stories and imagery from the traditional Balinese wayang kulit (‘shadowplay’), which itself draws from Hindu mythology and cosmology, specifically in this case an embedded story from the Mahabharata. In the original these four pieces are in a different order, and are used as accompaniment for Pak Wija’s narrative and singing. Angkat is traveling music; Ocean is water music; Meditasi is meditation; Head is the overture.

Piano Trio: Typical Music (2000) - 3 Mvts -30'

three movements for piano trio
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NOTES by the composer:

"Typical Music" was commissioned by the Sun Valley Center for the Arden Trio in 2000. Up until that time most of my music had been for unusual combinations of instruments, and the opportunity to write for this archetypically "classical" combination was both exciting and intimidating to me. My music often inhabits the space between musical traditions - classical and popular, western and eastern, and it was a challenge to write for instruments so firmly rooted in a single, well-known musical world. My solution was to simply forget about the boundaries, to let the music go where it needed to go, whatever the stylistic implications. I also wanted to write something that would both challenge and satisfy the players, to make it worth their time and effort. The title comes from a wonderful presentation of Burmese traditional music I attended in Boston: after an evening of extremely interesting vocal music and dance-accompaniments, the well-meaning hostess announced that the final piece would have no singer and no dance, it was just a piece of "typical music." The piece is dedicated to Martin Bresnick, my teacher and friend, whose own piano trio serves as a lofty pinnacle of pure music.

commissioned by Readers Digest/Meet the Composer and the Sun Valley Center for the Arts for the Arden Trio, premiered Ketchum, ID, January 2001

Tight Fitting Garments (2000)- Clarinet & Violin - 15'

Clarinet & Violin: "It Is And It Isn't," "Illusions of Purity," "Jubilee of Indifference"

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Jubilee of Indifference (1999)- Clarinet & Violin - 3'30"

Clarinet & Violin

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NOTES BY THE COMPOSER:

Jubilee of Indifference was composed as part of a larger duo project, Tight Fitting Garments, for myself and violinist Todd Reynolds. That project was conceived to be evolving and modular, so its various movements have been used in a number of different contexts, both under that overall title and as parts of other multi-movement works and installations. JoI has proven to be able to function independently, i.e., as a stand-alone piece on programs of other works.

In the score, I’ve not indicated dynamics, phrasing, or articulation; also the tempo marking itself can be interpreted in numerous ways. All these elements – everything other than the pitches and rhythms, in the order in which they’re written – are left to the players, with the understanding that the piece works best when there’s a tight synchrony between all of the above, i.e., when the two players sound as much like a single instrument as possible. Over many performances we did find (news flash) that using all of the above effectively – varying dynamics, working out phrasing and articulation, i.e., being musical – tended to make things sound better, but, hey...feel free to prove me wrong...

Melody Competition (1999, rev. 2000) - PERC 6TET - 21'

for percussion sextet

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commissioned and premiered by red fishblue fish, Steven Schick, director; UCSD, La Jolla, CA, May 1999

Serenity Now (1998) - NONET - 5'

commissioned by Chamber Music Conference of the East, Bennington, VT
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Dreams of a Dominant Culture (1997) - Sextet - 20'

for flute, clarinet, percussion, electric piano, violin, cello

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NOTES by the composer:

Dreams of a Dominant Culture takes its inspiration from the gadhon chamber tradition of central Javanese court gamelan, in which various types of intricate and virtuosic heterophony are performed in an unobtrusive and non-soloistic manner. An audience member – even or perhaps particularly an outsider to the culture - can feel like the fortunate witness to a highly refined communal meditation, rather than the recipient of a directed communiqué from a group of performers.

Dreams of a Dominant Culture should be performed in this spirit. Its affect should never feel forced on the listener, but rather should flow from an introverted, private place that one hopes will be found engaging and interesting. Despite the difficulty of the parts (for which I deeply apologize!), the melodies should sound effortless, tossed-off, and lyrical.

Commissioned and premiered by Boston Musica Viva, Richard Pittman, conductor; Longy School, Cambridge, October 1997

String Quartet #2: Eel Bone (1996) 13'

string quartet - one movement
commissioned and premiered by Kronos Quartet, San Francisco, May 1996

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Kebyar Maya (1995) - Cello Octet - 14'

cello octet

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Notes by the composer:

KEBYAR MAYA was composed for and dedicated to cellist Maya Beiser, who released it on her 2000 CD Kinship. It is inspired by and based on Kebyar Ding Sempati, an early 20th century piece for Balinese gamelan gong kebyar of unknown authorship. The composer thanks the Rockefeller Multi-Arts Program (MAP) and the MIT Council for the Arts for their generous support.

This cello octet version of Kebyar Maya is based on the original multitrack version for soloist and pre-recorded backing track, which can be found in the 'Other Solos & Duos' category on this website.

Pay Phone (1993) - amplified quintet - 7'

violin, viola, electric guitar, bass clarinet, keyboard

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Esto House (1993) - amplified quintet - 10'

violin, viola, electric guitar, bass clarinet, keyboard

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Bossa Nova (1991) - brass quintet - 3'

commissioned by MIT for the inauguration of President Charles Vest

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Tree Frog (1990) - amplified sextet - 25'

bass clarinet, baritone saxophone, trombone, percussion, keyboard, violin

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commissioned & premiered by Sound Pressure, Toronto, 1990, Canada

Be-In (1990) - Bs Clar & Chamber Ens (3 Versions) - 9'

VERSIONS AVAILABLE:
Bass clarinet and string quartet
3 Clarinets, 2 bass clarinets
Amplified Sextet (clarinet, drums, mandolin, electric piano, cello, bass)

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Bs Clar & Str 4tet Download Now - Score & Parts - $40

PROGRAM NOTES BY THE COMPOSER:
My earliest goal in life - formulated during a 1968 trip to San Francisco with my parents - was to be a hippie. My family drove our Ford Country Squire from Chicago, we went to Haight-Ashbury to gawk, and I was hooked. At age 13 I spent a week at my aunt's Ann Arbor commune and my aspirations were confirmed. Only later was this replaced by the marginally more respectable goal of writing music. The two remain intertwined: anything I've done that was musically worthwhile was made possible by the 60s. Everyone who was anyone was reaching out to non-western music - not just Stockhausen and the Beatles, but also B.J. Thomas and the Partridge Family - all 'went raga' at some point or another. Much of my work is built around the anomalies and contradictions of cross-cultural exchange, but in this piece there are no such problems: gestures from a variety of genres are combined as if all that were needed to make them get along were good will and positive energy. Would that it were so...

The original version of Be-in was written very quickly, for a group called "Evan and the All-stars," which gave a single performance in Hartford, in 1991. I had only recently gotten my first computer – a MacPlus with a 20MB external hard drive – and this was one of the first pieces I didn’t notate by hand. Surprise surprise, the system crashed, I lost everything, so what you will hear is only a memory of the piece I originally wrote. It has had several other incarnations, re-orchestrated for the Michael Gordon Philharmonic, for a baroque-folk consort, for string orchestra, and for clarinet choir. The C-drone that starts the piece is homage to Terry Riley and to the late violist John Lad, who played it dozens of time, and who was himself a participant in the original 'be-in,' in San Francisco on January 14, 1967, the official start of the Age of Aquarius.

Dog Dream (1990) - Sextet - 12'

flute, clarinet, percussion, piano, violin, cello, electric guitar
commissioned and premiered by California EAR Unit, LA County Museum<
Print edition only - for information please contact info@airplaneears.com

Twine (1985) - soprano vox, 2 sax, bs cl, vln, vla, perc - 12'

three movements for soprano, two saxophones, bass clarinet, violin, viola, percussion
Print edition only - for information please contact info@airplaneears.com

LUVTime (1984) - bs cl, bari sax, trb, perc, pno - 15'

three movements for bass clarinet, baritone saxophone, trombone, percussion, piano

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Ten String Quartets (1979) 10'

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Works for Solo Piano

Don’t Want to Wait (2017) (Southworth/Ziporyn) 8'

solo piano - co-composed with Christine Southworth

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commissioned by Joel Fan, premiered at Open Source Music Festival, NY, NY, 2017

You Are Getting Sleepy (2015) 14'

solo piano
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commissioned by Sarah Cahill, on the occasion of Terry Riley's 80th Birthday
premiered by Sarah Cahill at Kresge Auditorium, MIT, Cambridge MA, April 2015

PROGRAM NOTES BY THE COMPOSER
The title of course should be spoken in a mock-middle-European accent, with emphasis on the SLEEEE. A pocket watch swinging back and forth should also be in the picture. As with most forms of hypnosis, it may only work on the susceptible. Terry taught me to love polyrhythms, not just as ideas but as ways of making time multidimensional, opening doors of perception. The piece starts with quiet full attention, stays there for more than a little while, and ends in tempestuous,w aking dream. I made it with both Terry and Sarah in mind, in deep thanks for their friendship and their music.

KEEP IT DOWN (2012) – 6’

solo piano
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PROGRAM NOTES BY THE COMPOSER
Keep It Down was written during a residency at the Ucross Foundation, a 20,000-acre cattle ranch in northeastern Wyoming. It awaits its first performance for a human audience.

100 30' Pieces for 2 Pianos (2011) - 2 Pnos 4 Hds 50'

2 pianos, 4 hands

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NOTES by the composer:

These pieces were written during the very cold month of January 2011; Christine Southworth also wrote a matching set at the same time. The title is literal: each piece (in both sets) is exactly 30 seconds long. The set can be performed in its entirety or broken up into smaller subsets/suites.

In Bounds (2004) 12"

solo piano
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commissioned by Cristina Valdes, premiered 2004, El Salvador

PROGRAM NOTES by the composer
In Bounds was written for Cristina Valdes in the summer of 2004, more or less on a dare. Cristina joined the Bang on a Can All-stars for a US tour that spring, and I was immediately struck by her vividness of her playing. It brought to mind an amazing performance of the Schumann Toccata I had heard 20 years earlier by the great (and now, sadly, recently deceased) Berkeley pianist Barbara Shearer. She made the piano vibrate with such controlled hysteria that one feared the hall itself might collapse. My goal was to channel a similar energy through a very different rhetoric. Cristina planned to premiere the piece in Havana; with this in mind, its initial rhythms (soon obscured) come from santeria. But bureaucracy intervened: the first performance was in El Salvador instead.

Pondok (2000) - Four Movements - 21'

solo piano

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four movements - 'Fragrant Forest' (4:30), 'Tree Trunk' (3:45), 'Ginoman' (2:00), 'Gebyog (Husk)' (10:00)
Commissioned for Sarah Cahill by the Peter S. Reed Foundation.

PROGRAM NOTES by the composer (2000)
Pondok is Indonesian for “guesthouse” or “hut,” such as the tiny bamboo structure I lived in during my first stay in Bali in 1981. I went there straight out of college, prepared to enhance my musical education but completely unprepared for the cultural and sensory overload that living in a foreign country brings. I would return to my pondok to make sense of it all and to transcribe the music I’d learned, study the language, smoke kretek on the porch, listen to shortwave radio and pirated cassettes, and write letters. Twenty years later, this piece imagines a different level of repose. Each movement is based on a particular aspect of a particular piece of Balinese music; these musical kernels are then taken in their own directions, which may or may not remind the listener of their source. The aspects or kernels I use in this piece are, first, an attitude toward phrasing (“Fragrant Forest,” from the first scene of a shadow play), followed by a particular rhythm (“Tree Trunk,” from the “beleganjur” marching music), an acoustical byproduct (“Ginoman,” from the introductions to ancient “lelambatan” style), and, finally, the relationship between the postures of the players and the music they produce (“Gebyog,” from the female rice pounding music of west Bali). Pondok was written for Sarah Cahill, to whom it is dedicated.

Fractal-Head (1986) 15'

solo piano
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Some Coal (1985) - Eleven movements 30'

solo piano
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Some Coal:11 movements for solo piano
An Agenda for Theory, Illusions of Purity, Myths to Live By, Against Method!, Want Need, It Is and It Isn’t, From “the Educated Town” Flags Flapping, What I Fear, What Is Fear?!?, Ant Part
Some Coal was written at 121 Henry St., Brooklyn, NY from March, 1983 to January, 1984. It was premiered by the composer at the University of Natal, Durban, South Africa in 1984. It was revised and recopied in Oakland, CA in December, 1986. This engraving is by the composer and Ryan Meyer in August/September 2018.

The Water's Fine (1983) 30'

solo piano
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Weltscenen (1981) 20'

solo piano
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premiered by Christopher Oldfather, Sprague Hall, New Haven CT, 1982

Other Solos & Duos

Shiki Soko (2017) - Solo Koto 7’15"

solo koto with voice

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commissioned by Alex Rigopulos and Sachi Sato, for Sumie Kaneko

Trace (2017) - Solo Viola - 4'

solo viola
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commissioned by Music Now, in memoriam David Cohen

Headband (2016) - solo drum kit - 5'

solo drum kit - written for and dedicated to Ian Ding

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Tunggal (2016) - Solo Vibraphone - 10'

Solo Vibraphone (solo bonang version also available)

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Old Growth (2015) - VC & Fixed Media - 15'30"

Cello and fixed media (audio and optional video), 4 movements

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Backing audio tracks are included with the purchase of this score; optional video and click tracks are also available upon request. To access tracks, and for more information, please contact info@airplaneears.com

PROGRAM NOTES BY THE COMPOSER:
The four movements of Old Growth are inspired by and composed around archival, mid-20th century field recordings from Africa and Indonesia. The backing tracks all use samples from these recordings, looped and filtered in various ways, and combined with other electronics. Mugangara, Malume, and Mugasha contain samples from the CD “Tanzania Instruments 1950,” originally recorded by Hugh Tracey for the Institute of African Music. They are used with permission of SWP Records. The musicians on the original tracks are: Mugangara - Ruthahindurwa Lukaka; Malume - Ngaina Nolo & Mtonya Bota; Mugasha - Habib Bin Seliman. Wargasari is built around Balinese vocalist Ni Lemon's 1928 recording of the same name with the Janger Abian Timbul group, originally recorded for Odeon. The remastered original track, Kidung Wargasari, is available on the “Roots of Gamelan Volume 2” CD and is used with the permission of World Arbiter Records.

Come with Me If You Want to Live (2014) - Perc & Fixed Media - 10'30"

percussion and fixed media, for Glenn Kotche
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FAQs (2014) - Tenor Voice & Piano - 7”

piano, tenor
for Timur Bekbosunov

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Scenes from Shadow Bang (2013) - 2 Mvts - Viola & Pno 11'

Viola, piano - 2 movements (Scene One, Fragrant Forest)

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Honey from Alast (2013) - Viola & Percussion 11’30”

viola, percussion (frame drum, vibraphone)
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NOTES by the composer:

HONEY FROM ALAST was commissioned by Lafayette College for DuoJalal (Kathryn Lockwood, viola, and Yousif Sheronick, percussion), receiving its world premiere there on February 4, 2014. It is based on the following poem by Rumi (translated by A.J. Arberry):

Welcome, melody—you are that melody which has brought a sign from the spiritual world.

Pass by the ear and strike upon our souls, for you are the life of this dead world. Ravish the soul and go aloft into that world where you have carried the heart. Your laughing moon bears evidence that you have quaffed that heavenly wine. Your sweet soul gives a sign that you were nourished in honey from Alast.

Blades have begun to sprout from the earth to show the sowings that you have made.

Honey From Alast is dedicated to Alan & Wendy Pesky

THREE BROMANCES (2012) – CELLO & TABLA (15’: 5’, 5’,5’)

3 movements
1) Don & San
2) T.& H.
3) Gradus ad Parnassum


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PROGRAM NOTES BY THE COMPOSER
Three Bromances was at the request of Yoyo Ma and Sandeep Das. Don & San is a portrait of a friendship; T.&H. takes its inspiration from literary history, casting the cellist and tablaist as two of Mark Twain’s more memorable boyhood friends; Gradus ad Parnassum attempts to imagine how Claude Debussy might have composed the first movement of his Children’s Corner had he scored it for cello and tabla.

100 30' Pieces for 2 Pianos (2011) - 2 Pnos 4 Hds 50'

2 pianos, 4 hands

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NOTES by the composer:

These pieces were written during the very cold month of January 2011; Christine Southworth also wrote a matching set at the same time. The title is literal: each piece (in both sets) is exactly 30 seconds long. The set can be performed in its entirety or broken up into smaller subsets/suites.

Hval (2007) - Solo Double Bass - 10'

solo bass
commissioned by Robert Black

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Speak, At-man! (2006) - Alto Flute & Piano - 10'

alto flute and piano - single movement

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Tight Fitting Garments (2000)- Clarinet & Violin - 15'

Clarinet & Violin: "It Is And It Isn't," "Illusions of Purity," "Jubilee of Indifference"

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Jubilee of Indifference (1999)- Clarinet & Violin - 3'30"

Clarinet & Violin

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NOTES BY THE COMPOSER:

Jubilee of Indifference was composed as part of a larger duo project, Tight Fitting Garments, for myself and violinist Todd Reynolds. That project was conceived to be evolving and modular, so its various movements have been used in a number of different contexts, both under that overall title and as parts of other multi-movement works and installations. JoI has proven to be able to function independently, i.e., as a stand-alone piece on programs of other works.

In the score, I’ve not indicated dynamics, phrasing, or articulation; also the tempo marking itself can be interpreted in numerous ways. All these elements – everything other than the pitches and rhythms, in the order in which they’re written – are left to the players, with the understanding that the piece works best when there’s a tight synchrony between all of the above, i.e., when the two players sound as much like a single instrument as possible. Over many performances we did find (news flash) that using all of the above effectively – varying dynamics, working out phrasing and articulation, i.e., being musical – tended to make things sound better, but, hey...feel free to prove me wrong...

Current Rate (1999) - 2 Pipa (or Solo Pipa Multitrack) 15'

2 Chinese pipa (or solo pipa multitracked))
commissioned and premiered by Wu Man at Bang on a Can Women and Music, Henry Street Settlement
Print edition only - for information please contact info@airplaneears.com

Kebyar Maya (1995) - Solo Cello and Fixed Media - 14'

solo cello and Fixed Media

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Notes by the composer:

KEBYAR MAYA was composed for and dedicated to cellist Maya Beiser, who released it on her 2000 CD Kinship. It is inspired by and based on Kebyar Ding Sempati, an early 20th century piece for Balinese gamelan gong kebyar of unknown authorship. The composer thanks the Rockefeller Multi-Arts Program (MAP) and the MIT Council for the Arts for their generous support.

This is the original version of Kebyar Maya, for which the soloist must prepare backing tracks. For information on backing track parts please contact info@airplaneears.com
A live cello octet version of Kebyar Maya is available and can be found in the 'Chamber Ensembles' category of this website.

Studies in Normative Behaviour, Vol 1 (1991) - Solo Percussion -10'

solo percussionist
commissioned and premiered by Daniel J. Tunick
Print edition only - for information please contact info@airplaneears.com

The Motions (1990) - Viola & Piano - 9'

viola & piano, dedicated to John Lad

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NOTES by the composer:

'The Motions for John Lad' was originally 'The Motions' for John Lad. John performed it on numerous occasions in the 1990s, usually during sets by groups we played in together, mainly Evan & The All-stars or the Michael Gordon Philharmonic. John’s devotion to tai chi imbued his viola playing along with every other aspect of his life: he was grounded and radiant, whether he was ‘doing the form,’ teaching philosophy at Barnard, playing chamber music, watching pro photo or martial arts videos, dancing tango, rooting against the Yankees, or navigating us through the wilds of newly post-Iron Curtain Eastern Europe. In tai chi and in life, he taught me what it really meant to ‘go through the motions.’

The Motions was really FOR him, his sound, his being. I never gave it to any other players, and when he passed away suddenly in 2007 I figured that was that. In early 2018 one of his former students contacted me about it, and that sparked me to put it out in the world, for whatever that’s worth. I’ve changed the title and made a few other extremely minor revisions.

The only major change is the piano part itself, which starts at m. 91. In the original version this material (more or less) was played by whatever forces happened to be on hand: the rest of the band, or, for solo performances, John’s own multitrack recording. If you prefer to perform with John’s recording, or to make your own version of that material, please let me know and/or feel free.

China Spring (1991) - Oboe & Piano - 15'

for oboe and piano, commissioned and premiered by Peter Cooper and Evan Ziporyn
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Arrangements & Transcriptions

Blackstar Concerto after David Bowie: "Blackstar" (2017) 45'

for full orchestra with Maya Beiser, solo cello
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David Bowie: "Let's Dance" (2016)

for full orchestra

Uncovered (2014) album for Maya Beiser

Maya Beiser, solo cello
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Led Zeppelin: "Black Dog"
Chester Burnett (Howlin' Wolf): "Moanin' at Midnight"
Jimi Hendrix: "Little Wing"
Janis Joplin: "Summertime"
King Crimson: "Epitaph"
Pink Floyd: "Wish You Were Here"
Muddy Waters: "Louisiana Blues"
Kurt Cobain: "Lithium"
AC/DC: "Back in Black"
Led Zeppelin: "Kashmir"

B-52s: "Dead Beat Club" for solo piano (2008)

clarinet, cello, doublebass, e-guitar, piano/keyboard, percussion

Conlon Nancarrow: Four Studies (2a, 3a, 3c, 11) (2002) 17'

clarinet, cello, doublebass, e-guitar, piano/keyboard, percussion

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premiered at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, October 2002

Conlon Nancarrow ideas - politically and musically - put him at odds with American conventional wisdom; in both cases, he chose isolation rather than compromising his principles. In self-imposed exile in Mexico City, he corresponded with Elliott Carter and mail-ordered a Harry Partch LP. (Sales were so scarce that Partch himself came for a visit, during with Nancarrow neglected to reveal that he was a composer himself!) For decades, Nancarrow composed only for player pianos, working alone and by hand, spending months punching holes in rolls to produce 40-plus compact, revolutionary Studies, which collectively have redefined our notions of time and meter in music.

Nancarrow's place in the pantheon is now ensured: Ligeti has acknowledged him as an influence (the Piano Concerto and Etudes are unthinkable without Nancarrow), Arditti commissioned a piece, various groups perform faithful and elegant transcriptions. But even Nancarrow's most ardent acolytes often apologize for or ignore key aspects of his music: the simplicity of the melodies, the harshness of the player piano sound, and the fact that the source of his ideas is American popular music. Nancarrow heard something in boogie woogie, in swing, in the blues: not just the implicit polyrhythms of all African American music but the possibility of simultaneous rhythmic identities coexisting in a single piece. Not just cross-rhythms, but Lester Young floating over the bar line. Like Stravinsky, like Bartok, like Andriessen, Nancarrow abstracted these ideas structurally and retained their source on the surface; and as in all these cases, both the abstract ideas and their connection to their popular roots are necessary.

These arrangements, made specifically for this performance, are attempts to retain the visceral intensity of the music, to retain the juxtaposition of a happy, human lyricism with a machine-made, maniacal energy. The idea of extreme abutment, of pushing familiar elements to unexpected but inevitable extremes, is something I hear in and love about Louis' music. In my reworkings I have tried to keep this essence in mind above all else. No doubt, these are not the arrangements Louis would have made, but they are made with him in mind, a stance taken, sent as correspondance, as argument, as homage.

Kurt Cobain: "Lithium" (1995)

clarinet, cello, doublebass, e-guitar, piano/keyboard, percussion

Brian Eno: "Music for Airports 2/2"

clarinet, cello, doublebass, e-guitar, piano/keyboard, percussion

Brian Eno: "Burning Airlines Gives You So Much More"

clarinet, cello, doublebass, e-guitar, piano/keyboard, percussion

Brian Eno: "Everything Merges Into Night"

clarinet, cello, doublebass, e-guitar, piano/keyboard, percussion

Hermeto Pascoal: "Arapua"

clarinet, cello, doublebass, e-guitar, piano/keyboard, percussion

Hermeto Pascoal: "Ilha das Gavotas"

clarinet, cello, doublebass, e-guitar, piano/keyboard, percussion

Hermeto Pascoal: "Quiabo"

clarinet, cello, doublebass, e-guitar, piano/keyboard, percussion

Robert Schumann: "Canon"

clarinet, cello, doublebass, e-guitar, piano/keyboard, percussion