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February 27, 2002
Media Contact: Michele Douglas, (615) 322-2471
michele.Douglas@vanderbilt.edu
Paul Dresher Electro-Acoustic Band to Perform at Vanderbilt
Composer and pianist Terry Riley and Joan Jeanrenaud, former cellist with Kronos Quartet, will be featured guests in a concert by the Paul Dresher Electro-Acoustic Band at Vanderbilt University Wednesday, March 27, at 8 p.m. The concert is sponsored by Great Performances at Vanderbilt.
The Electro-Acoustic Band, formed by Dresher in 1993, performs commissioned works from a diverse range of contemporary composers using traditional acoustic and contemporary electronic instruments. Its music, based in a mix of classical, rock and roll, jazz and world music, brings together some of today's most innovative and irreverent musical trends.
The group is composed of six musicians and two sound engineers and often performs with guest performers.
Riley, noted composer of contemporary music, will perform "Banana Humberto 2000," and Jeanrenaud will be featured in a performance of Dresher's new work, "Unequal Distemperament."
Paul Dresher, internationally known for his ability to integrate diverse musical influences into his own coherent style, is pursuing many forms of music expression, including opera and music theater, chamber and orchestral composition, musical instrument invention and composition for theater, dance and film.
Terry Riley is well known as one of the founders of the minimalist movement, which was launched in 1964 and has influenced many other composers such as Philip Glass, John Adams and Steve Reich, as well as rock groups such as The Who. He has created commissioned works for many ensembles including the Kronos Quartet, the Assad Brothers, and the St. Louis Symphony.
Joan Jeanrenaud, a native of Memphis, Tennessee, began performing as part of the Kronos Quartet at the age of 22 and over the course of twenty years performed more than 2,000 concerts throughout the world with the ensemble. She has worked with many noted composers including Philip Glass, John Cage, Astor Piazzolla, John Zorn, David Byrne and many others. She left Kronos in 1999 to pursue her solo career.
Tickets to the performance are $28, 24, 20; $14 for students and children; $14 for Vanderbilt faculty and staff; and $7 for Vanderbilt students.
Tickets are available at the Sarratt Box Office and at all Ticketmaster outlets or by calling (615) 255-9600 or visiting http://www.ticketmaster.com online.
Great Performances at Vanderbilt is run by a student committee that coordinates the selection of the season and handles all arrangements for the performances. The Great Performances chair for 2001-2002 is Catherine Wylly.
-VU-
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Anthony Davis, "Blue Funk into Darkness" for Cello and Ensemble
The piece is structured in one continuous movement in three sections. The first begins with the cello alone and evolves into interlocking polyphonic melodies that engage in rhythmic play. The section culminates in a slow emerging blues. The second section employs improvisation for the cello against composed textures that evolve independently. The final section is an extended song for the cello that moves between contemplative lyricism and expressive dance.
Anthony Davis' Blue Funk into Darkness was commissioned by the Lively Arts at Stanford and Musical Traditions, Inc., and made possible by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller MAP Fund.
Paul Dresher "Unequal Distemperament: a Concerto for Cello and Electro Acoustic Band"
First and foremost the inspiration for this work comes from my long held desire to work again with cellist Joan Jeanrenaud. I Joan met back in 1982 when the Kronos Quartet commissioned and premiered my quartet, Casa Vecchia. I found her virtuosity quite compelling and have wanted since then to find a context to further explore her musicality.
The work is in a single continuous movement. In addition to exploring Joan's virtuosity and the typical challenges of the concerto form, much of the material in the work explores different tuning systems (also called temperaments). The temperaments used in the piece involve both a systematic organization of tuning based on the harmonic series and highly subjective non-systematic tunings based purely on the effect of the conflict between our expectations of "normal" diatonic temperament and the more adventurous tunings used in the piece. This conflict yielded the title of the work: Unequal Distemperament.
For those not knowledgeable about this aspect of music, it is probably sufficient to say that the tunings often used in this work are not the same as those found and almost all classical music written since 1750. However, before 1750, a variety of tuning systems were used in European classical music. These tunings are still the basis of many musics from outside the European tradition (the classical music of India and Indonesia particularly come to mind). The "blue notes" in jazz and blues are a similar use of intonation for expression. Numerous composers, including as Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Ben Johnston, Glenn Braca and many others, have deeply explored this musical resource throughout the 20th century up until today. Joan Jeanrenaud has worked with many of these composers, brilliantly performing works requiring this different and challenging approach to intonation.
In my work, the alternative tunings are usually first played by the electronic instruments, becoming the point of reference for the cello, violin and bassoon. These acoustic instruments may or may not be required to match the pitch of the electronic instruments. The electronic sounds are all samples (digital recordings for the playback by electronic instruments) of the sounds of an instrument I invented recently in collaboration with instrument inventor Daniel Schmidt. This instrument, which I call a Quadrachord, has four 14 foot long steel strings suspended over a wooden beam, which could be thought of as a very long guitar neck. However, instead of pressing the strings completely down to the neck while bowing or plucking, one only partially depresses the string, allowing secondary tones, or harmonics, to sound. What is remarkable about this in comparison to other instruments is that the Quadrachord is capable of easily and accurately playing harmonics up to the 24th partial. Again, for those not knowledgeable about the physics of music, let it suffice to say that pitches derived in this way are often very different from the notes on the piano (what is known as "equal temperament") and when used in combination with other such pitches, yield very unusual harmonies which deeply intrigue me.
At first, some listeners may experience these intervals as "out of tune"; however, these intervals offer new expressive and formal possibilities not available in the traditional tempered system. I hope that in this work, these sounds bring something unique to the experience, whether consciously or not, of listening to virtuoso chamber music.
Unequal Distemperament is dedicated to the memory of my wife, Robin Kirck Dresher and to Natasha Beery and Sandy McCoy who helped my family survive Robin's passing and made possible the birthing of this work.
Paul Dresher, January 2001
Paul Dresher's Concerto for Cello and Electro-Acoustic Band was commissioned by the Lively Arts at Stanford and Musical Traditions, Inc., and made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Paul Hanson, "Pull of the Gold Rope"
The title Pull of The Gold Rope is a description of a concept I had in a daydream. I was sitting in a white room pulling a gold chain or rope; as I pulled, my surroundings would change. They would change from very stark and minimal to progressively more and more colors, constantly changing as I found myself in different surroundings. This gave me the idea to write a musical interpretation of my imagination. Musically speaking, this work could be called a combination of minimalist ideas and jazz melodicism. However, both the terms "minimalist" and "jazz melodicism" connote two separate worlds musically, rather than the place where they are both naturally equal partners in a common musical world. This composition is about exploring that place of natural partnership.
Terry Riley, "Banana Humberto 2000: Concerto for Piano and Electro Acoustic Band", 2000
What can be said by the author once the music is written? Well he really should say it all comes from God, modestly not taking any credit himself, but then God doesn't want to write program notes and if it is not successful he probably does not want to get the bad reviews....
The composer can play music critic and review it giving himself a glowing report card and beat the real music critic to the punch......
or give a play by play blow of how ideas occurred to him or didn't occur to him and he had to write the piece anyway cause there was a deadline and there was a hard piano part to learn and he had to stop writing at some point and start practicing....
or one can write lengthy poetic word descriptions that far outshine the new work or worse yet, embarrass the real poets in the audience.....
He can analyze what he thinks he understands of its music construction and risk putting the audience to sleep before the first note is sounded.....
He can write several pages indicating this piece is more important than pieces with shorter program note....
or write a very brief haiku description leaving everyone wondering if there is some deep hidden mystery they must discover.....
or he can simply say this is a 65 year old composer's first attempt to write a piano concerto. Thanks for listening and please enjoy!
BANANA HUMBERTO 2000 was supported in part by a grant from the Ross McKee Foundation with additional support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller MAP Fund. Commissioned by Musical Traditions, Inc., the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts and Emory University as part of the national series of works from Meet The Composer/Arts Endowment Commissioning Music/USA which is made possible by generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Helen F. Whitaker Fund, The Catherine Filene Shouse Foundation, and the Dayton Hudson Foundation.
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