Ms. Suzuki did a project at Weill Hall where young musicians composed tunes and conposers composed works based on the young composers' tunes.
Buried in the little duo is the ostinato created by Shoko Suzuki's 4th Grade Class.
Ebb & Flow commissioned the final, elaborated version.
For several years, Anderson experimented with couterpoints of arrays.
Guitar has an array; violin arco has an array, violin pizz has an array.
...add screenshot of the arrays...
Thanks to Isaac Alderson, the extraordinary piper, and the Cygnus players. The piece was written for Isaac when Cygnus was in residence at Sarah Lawrence College.
Variations on the folksong, "I will give my love an apple"
Thanks for Angel Mendez for his excellent recent performances of Poema harmónico. Look for a link to those performances and others here, shortly.
Attached here is the premiere performance by the composer in Maui, thanks to Ebb & Flow Arts, and a studio recording made on Maui.
This is another piece that came out of Anderson's work with Judith Pearce, Annie Hat and the Weekend of Chamber Music in Sullivan County, in the Catskills.
This piece introduces Elliott Carter's all-trichord hexachord to bourgeois (functional harmonic) society.
Scherzo for guitar is dedicated to David Starobin and his Stauffer
Scherzo for fortepiano is dedicated to Robert Levin
Thanks to Jacob ter Veldhuis (Jacob TV) for organizing performances of this piece throughout Holland in 1994 or 5.
Many thanks to Daniel Conant for his excellent performances of this very tricky little piece.
The first movement is a parergon to Schoenberg's Op. 27 #4. In this movement, elements of the 2nd movement are found, but in different contexts. The pentatonic riffs bridge aggregates; while in the 2nd movement ("Simple Composition"), the pentatonic material is the focal harmony of the opening.
The third movement is a sonata form based on harmonic quality rather than transpositiion. For the duration of entire sections, one "chord quality" prevails, but can point toward a way out, into something else.
The video here is the 4th movement in an early version.
Thanks to the truly remarkable players:
Benjamin Grow, Conductor
Koh Kazama & composer, guitars
Kinga Augustyn, Keats Dieffenbach, violins
Jocelyn Pan, viola
Serafim Smigelskiy, violoncello
I. Allegro (for two mandolins)
II. Grazioso (for two guitars)
III. Andante (for guitar & theorbo)
IV. Allegro (for two guitars)
Thanks to Anthony Korf for his orchestration, to George Rothman's Riverside Symphony's conductor, to the unique singer, Elizabeth Farnum, and Zaidee Parkinson.
The sound samples here are the chamber version.
The MP3 here is of a reduction for 2 guitars, but the preferred version is for voice & string orchestra, or voice & 2 guitars.
The Wedding Dress
The Er-i-e
Whistle, Daughter Whistle
The Er-i-e Reprise
The Farmer is the Man
Thanks to Dina Koston, who presented a longer version of this piece for mandolin and piano at the Kennedy Center. The piece explores some simple harmonic ideas that are obviously quite influenced by Schoenberg's Op. 27 #4.
The Washington Post called that "a long yawn". Composer agreed, and reworked and eventually settled on this number to be the most worthy of the experiments from that period.
Looking at some of the other movements today, some are really fun and quite salvageable.
Here's the youtube playlist for the Bowers/Fader January 27 performance at the American Opera Center.
J’Entends le Moulin
Baudelaire said he despises anything positif. I get that. Yes, that which is distinct leaves too little access to mysterious and powerful forces that make us feel we are in the presence of something big, something that has to be written with a capital letter. When I encounter those forces, surprising music starts pouring. The Symbolists allied themselves with fairy tales and folksongs; they were jealous of their mysterious indefiniteness. The Symbolists were also in thrall to Wagner, whose ancient myths and legends have all the magic of a fairy tale. I used the words from Québécois folksongs, and did not listen to the traditional musical settings, with the exception of Ziguezon, whose traditional setting I tried my best to forget, but the bizarre story can only be chanted so many ways. The cycle of songs got off the ground with Ziguezon, which I had always found a most bizarre and mysterious story. What is going on in the water? Does the gender of the narrator shift midway through? The folk lyrics are vague enough to take, to read, in almost any way, and the music can suggest readings that are not perhaps the first, most obvious reading. Jon Anderson’s Yes lyrics have this wonderful vagueness.
First performance at the Italian Academy at Columbia University, October 2014
Thanks to Zaidee Parkinson & Alanna Maharajh Stone.
Optional Tibetan overtone singing in
1. Seen from the "L" / Rite of Spring (guitar, mandolin)
2. She Passed This Way (two guitars)
3. Crystals (guitar, theorbo)
4. The Child Would Be Older (guitar & theorbo)
5. Paradise / When the kissing flesh is gone (guitar & mandolin)
interlude
6. Pastoral (guitar & mandolin)
This setting of Gillian Welch's song uses 2 partitions of the same 4 part array. The array is partitioned in two ways. The ending is harmonically faster because of the 5/2/2/5 partition. The opening is lugubrious, with a slower harmonic rhythm that chugs along in the strait 3/3/3/3 partition.
Some of the tonal features of the original are superimposed over the array structure.
This is the last surviving portion of a project larger work based on Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil.
The MP3 here is of a reduction for 2 guitars, but the preferred version is for voice & string orchestra, or voice & 2 guitars.
The Wedding Dress
The Er-i-e
Whistle, Daughter Whistle
The Er-i-e Reprise
The Farmer is the Man