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PROGRAM

Missy Mazzoli: Still Life with Avalanche (2008)
George Perle: Critical Moments 2 (2001)
Thomas Adès: Catch (1991)
Stephen Hartke: Meanwhile (2007)
Steve Reich: Double Sextet (2007)

BIOGRAPHY

Described by The New Yorker as “friendly, unpretentious, idealistic and highly skilled,” the Grammy Award-winning eighth blackbird promises its ever-increasing audiences provocative and engaging performances. It is widely lauded for its performing style – often playing from memory with virtuosic and theatrical flair – and its efforts to make new music accessible to wide audiences. A New York Times reviewer raved, “eighth blackbird’s performances are the picture of polish and precision, and they seem to be thoroughly engaged…by music in a broad range of contemporary styles.” The sextet has been the subject of profiles in the New York Times and on NPR’s All Things Considered; it has also been featured on Bloomberg TV’s Muse, CBS’s Sunday Morning, St. Paul Sunday, Weekend America and The Next Big Thing, among others. In 2008 the group’s recording of “strange imaginary animals” won the Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance. The ensemble is in residence at the University of Richmond in Virginia and at the University of Chicago.

The centerpiece of eighth blackbird's 2007-2008 season is its kinetic program “The Only Moving Thing”, featuring new commissions by Steve Reich, and maverick composers David Lang, Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe. The group is also premiering Mirrors, a ground-breaking new multimedia work by composer Tamar Muskal and interactive digital artist Danny Rozin, as well as a new work by Stephen Hartke as part of the group’s “Sound Mirror” program. This season, eighth blackbird makes their debut at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall and the Pittsburgh Chamber Music Society, returns to the Kennedy Center, and is in residence at DePauw University and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. eighth blackbird also inaugurates its hometown series at the Harris Theater at Millennium Park.

In previous seasons the sextet has appeared in South Korea, Mexico, Canada, Amsterdam, and throughout North America, including performances at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, the Metropolitan Museum, the Kennedy Center, the Library of Congress, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the La Jolla Chamber Music Society, and has performed as soloist with the Utah Symphony and the American Composers Orchestra. During the summer the group has appeared several times at Cincinnati’s Music X, the Great Lakes Music Festival, Caramoor International Music Festival, and Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. They have also appeared at the Tanglewood Music Center, the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival, and in 2006 made their debut at the Ojai Music Festival, where the group was named Music Director for the 2009 season.

Since its founding in 1996, eighth blackbird has been active in commissioning new works from eminent composers such as George Perle, Frederic Rzewski, Joseph Schwantner, Paul Moravec, and Stephen Hartke, as well as ground-breaking works from Jennifer Higdon, Derek Bermel, David Schober, Daniel Kellogg, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, and the Minimum Security Composers Collective. The group received the first BMI/Boudleaux-Bryant Fund Commission and the 2007 American Music Center Trailblazer Award and has received grants from BMI, Meet the Composer, the Greenwall Foundation, and Chamber Music America, among others.

The ensemble is enjoying acclaim for its four CDs released to date on Cedille Records. The first, thirteen ways, was selected as a Top 10 CD of 2003 by Billboard magazine. beginnings, their second disc, was summed up by the New York Times: “The performances have all the sparkle, energy and precision of the earlier outings…It is their superb musicality and interpretive vigor that bring these pieces to life.” About fred, featuring the music of Frederic Rzewski, the San Francisco Chronicle reported: “The music covers all kinds of moods and approaches, from dreamy surrealism to caffeinated unison melodies, and the members of eighth blackbird deliver it all with their trademark panache.” Their fourth CD, titled strange imaginary animals, was released in November 2006. In 2006 the group debuted on the Naxos label in a performance of The Time Gallery, commissioned by eighth blackbird from 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Paul Moravec.

The members of eighth blackbird hold degrees in music performance from Oberlin Conservatory, among other institutions. The group derives its name from the Wallace Stevens poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” The eighth stanza reads:

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know

PROGRAM NOTES

Steve Reich: Double Sextet (2007)

Steve Reich (b. 1936) was recently called "our greatest living composer" (the New York Times), “America’s greatest living composer" (The Village Voice), and “the most original musical thinker of our time” (The New Yorker). From his early taped speech pieces It's Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966) to his and video artist Beryl Korot’s digital video opera Three Tales (2002), Mr. Reich's path has embraced not only aspects of Western Classical music, but the structures, harmonies, and rhythms of non-Western and American vernacular music, particularly jazz. He has won numerous honors, including several Grammy Awards, and his music has been commissioned, performed and recorded by numerous orchestras and ensembles around the world. For his 70th birthday year (2006), concerts were presented throughout Europe, North America and Asia, and Nonesuch Records released its second box set of Steve Reich’s works, “Phases: A Nonesuch Retrospective,” a five-CD collection spanning the 20 years of his time on the label. About Double Sextet, the composer writes:

There are two identical sextets in Double Sextet. Each one is comprised of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, vibraphone, and piano. Doubling the instrumentation was done so that, as in so many of my earlier works, two identical instruments could interlock to produce one overall pattern. For example, in this piece you will hear the pianos and vibes interlocking in a highly rhythmic way to drive the rest of the ensemble. The piece can be played in two ways; either with 12 musicians, or with six playing against a recording of themselves.

The idea of a single player playing against a recording of themselves goes all the way back to Violin Phase (1967) and extends though Vermont Counterpoint (1982), New York Counterpoint (1985), Electric Counterpoint (1987) and Cello Counterpoint (2003). The expansion of this idea to an entire chamber ensemble playing against pre-recordings of themselves begins with Different Trains (1988) and continues with Triple Quartet (1999) and now to Double Sextet. By doubling an entire chamber ensemble one creates the possibility for multiple simultaneous contrapuntal webs of identical instruments. In Different Trains and Triple Quartet all instruments are strings to produce one large string fabric. In Double Sextet there is more timbral variety through the interlocking of six different pairs of percussion, string and wind instruments.
The piece is in three movements—fast, slow, fast—and within each movement there are four harmonic sections built around the keys of D, F, Ab and B or their relative minor keys b, d, f and g#. As in almost all of my music, modulations from one key to the next are sudden, clearly setting off each new section.
Double Sextet is about 22 minutes long and was completed in October 2007. It was commissioned by eighth blackbird and received its world premiere by that group at the University of Richmond in Virginia on March 26, 2008. It won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Music.

Double Sextet was commissioned by eighth blackbird through the generous support of:

The Carnegie Hall Corporation, The Abe Fortas Memorial Fund of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Liverpool Cultural Company – European Capital of Culture 2008, The Modlin Center for the Arts at the University of Richmond, Orange County Performing Arts Center, The University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music - Music 08 Festival.

George Perle: Critical Moments 2 (2001)

George Perle (1915-2009), Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and a MacArthur Foundation fellow, was born in 1915 in Bayonne, New Jersey. He was among the first American composers to recognize and profoundly be influenced by the revolutionary transformation in the language of music embodied in the work of Arnold Schoenberg and the Second Vienna School, but from his first encounter with this tendency in summer 1937, he subjected it to a radical reinterpretation that he calls “12-tone tonality,” which is still the basis of his own musical language. Along with his many compositions, which are widely performed and recorded, he wrote seven books, including a two-volume study of the operas of Alban Berg.

Of his work, Mr. Perle writes: “The instrumentation of these nine short, self-contained, and strikingly individual movements for six players corresponds to that of Pierrot lunaire, except for the substitution of a percussion part for the quasi-spoken (sprechstimme) vocal part of Schoenberg’s work. I has taken much pleasure in the composition of a set of six such pieces in 1995-96, and was already strongly inclined to undertake such a project again when an unexpected commission from the Naumburg Foundation gave me an opportunity to do exactly that for eighth blackbird.”
Thomas Adès: Catch (1991)

Despite his relatively young age, British composer Thomas Adès (b. 1971) has won numerous awards and prizes, including the prestigious Grawemeyer Award (2000) of which he is the youngest ever recipient. However, the New Yorker recently remarked that “he has outgrown his status as the wunderkind of a vibrant British scene and become one of the most imposing figures in contemporary music,” such that a number of European festivals have focused programming on his music and Carnegie Hall appointed him to the R and B Debs Composer Chair in the 2007-2008 seaon, featuring him as composer, conductor and pianist. He has been Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival since 1999. About Catch, the composer writes:

Catch structures itself around various combinations of the four instruments. There are several games going on: at the start, the clarinet is the outsider, the other three are the unit, then, after a decoy entry, the clarinet takes the initiative. All four then play jovial ‘pig-in-the-middle’ with each other. The clarinet is then phased out leaving a sullen piano and cello, with interjections based on the clarinet’s original tune. This slower passage gradually mutates back into fast music, and this time the game is in earnest: the piano is squeezed out, only to lure the clarinet finally into the snare of its own music.

Stephen Hartke: Meanwhile: Incidental music to imaginary puppet plays (2007)

Stephen Hartke (b. 1952) has been hailed by the New York Times as one of America's "Young Lions." His music reflects the diversity of his musical background, from medieval and renaissance polyphony, of which he was once quite an active performer, to very personal syntheses of diverse elements from non-Western and popular music. He has enjoyed commissions and performances from numerous groups throughout the world, including the New York Philharmonic, the National Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Philharmonic, and the Moscow State Philharmonic Orchestra, among many others. He recently completed a full-length opera, The Greater Good, or the Passion of Boule de Suif, for Glimmerglass Opera.

In 2004, Hartke was awarded the Charles Ives Living Composers Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the purpose of which is to free him from the need to devote his time to any employment other than music composition. Hartke's music is available on CD on CRI, ECM New Series, EMI Classics, Naxos American Classics, and New World Records. Stephen Hartke lives in Glendale, California, and is Professor of Composition at the University of Southern California. About Meanwhile, the composer writes:

Meanwhile was composed on a commission from eighth blackbird and the Barlow Foundation, and it was nominated for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Music. It is one of several works of mine that has grown from a long-standing fascination I have had for various forms of Asian court and theater music, and in preparing to write this piece, I studied video clips of quite a number of puppet theater forms, ranging from the elegant and elaborate, nearly-life-sized puppets of Japanese Bunraku, to Vietnamese water puppets, both Indonesian and Turkish shadow puppets, and to classic Burmese court theater that mixes marionettes with dancers who look and act like marionettes.

This piece is a set of incidental pieces to no puppet plays in particular, but one in which the ensemble has been reinvented along lines that clearly have roots in these diverse Asian models. The piano, for instance, is prepared for much of the piece with large soft mutes to resemble a Vietnamese hammered dulcimer. The viola is tuned a half-step lower in order to both change its timbre and to open the way for a new set of natural harmonics to interact sometimes even microtonally with those of the cello. The percussion array includes 18 wood sounds, plus 4 cowbells, 2 small cymbals, a water gong, and a set of bongos. Finally, there is a set of three Flexatones, whose tone is rather like that of small Javanese gongs, and so I have given this new instrument the name of Flexatone Gamelan.

Meanwhile is played as a single movement, with 6 distinct sections: Procession, which features the Flexatone Gamelan; Fanfares, with the Piccolo and Bass Clarinet linked together much as a puppeteer and his marionette; Narration, in which the Bass Clarinet recites the ‘story’ of the scene in an extravagant and flamboyant solo reminiscent of the reciter in Japanese Bunraku; Spikefiddlers, which requires a playing technique for the viola and later the cello that stems from Central Asian classical music; Cradle-songs, the outer parts of which feature natural harmonics in the viola and cello combined with bell-like 9th-partial harmonics from the piano; and Celebration, where the Flutist and Clarinetist take up Flexatones to play the closing melody.

Missy Mazzoli: Still Life with Avalanche (2008)

Missy Mazzoli's music has been heard all over the world in performances by the Minnesota Orchestra, the South Carolina Philharmonic, the Spokane Symphony, the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, NOW Ensemble, the Da Capo Chamber Players and many others. She's recently been commissioned by Kronos Quartet, eighth blackbird, the Whitney Museum and Carnegie Hall. Missy was born in 1980 in Pennsylvania, and has studied composition at the Yale School of Music, the Royal Conservatory of the Hague, and Boston University. Her work was recently performed as part of the Bang-on-a-Can New Music Marathon and the 2007 Cabrillo Festival of New Music. In 2006 Missy was a featured composer at Merkin Hall in New York City and at the Gaudeamus New Music Festival in Amsterdam. She is a recipient of a Fulbright Grant to the Netherlands, the 2007 and 2008 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Award, a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and grants from the American Music Center and the Jerome Foundation. In 2006 she taught beginning composition at Yale University, and is now Executive Director of the MATA Festival of New Music in New York City, an organization founded by Philip Glass dedicated to commissioning and promoting new works by young composers. Missy is also an active pianist, and often performs with Victoire, an "all-star, all-female quintet" (Time Out New York) dedicated exclusively to her own compositions. Victoire has been performing in venues throughout New York City since 2008.
Recent projects included the premiere of Sound of the Light, a new work commissioned by Carnegie Hall and two performances of These Worlds In Us by the Minnesota Orchestra. Upcoming performances include the premiere of new works commissioned by the Kronos Quartet, eighth blackbird, the Whitney Museum of Art and the Santa Fe New Music Ensemble. She also recently received a Jerome Foundation Grant to support the creation of Song from the Uproar, a large-scale multimedia work featuring NOW Ensemble and filmmaker Stephen Taylor that will premiere in New York City in May, 2009.

The composer writes:

"Still Life with Avalanche is a pile of melodies collapsing in a chaotic free fall. The players layer bursts of sound over the static drones of harmonicas, sketching out a strange and evocative sonic landscape. I wrote this piece while in residence at Blue Mountain Center, a beautiful artist colony in upstate New York. Halfway through my stay there I received a phone call telling me my cousin had passed away very suddenly. There's a moment in this piece when you can hear that phone call, when the piece changes direction, when the shock of real life works its way into the music's joyful and exuberant exterior. This is a piece about finding beauty in chaos, and vice versa. It is dedicated to the memory (the joyful, the exuberant and the shocking) of Andrew Rose."

Still Life with Avalanche was commissioned by eighth blackbird through the generous support of Frederica and James R. Rosenfield, Kathleen Johnson and Paul Browning, Kirk Johnson, and William Johnson.