The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players is pleased to SAN FRANCISCO CONTEMPORARY MUSIC PLAYERS

announce that it has won a national David Milnes, Music Director

ASCAP/Chamber Music America Award for Adventurous Monday, 31 January 2005 8 pm
Programming for 2004-2005. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts - Forum

\ MIGRATIONS
Performers LIZA LIM
Tod Brody, flute The Heart's Ear (1997)
William Wohlmacher, clarinet (Sørensen,
Hosokawa, Maldonado)
Peter Josheff, clarinet (Lim, Maldonado) GYÖRGY LIGETI
Hall Goff, trombone Piano Etudes, (1988-2001)
Roy Malan, violin I (Lim, Sørensen)
From Book 2 From Book 3
Susan Freier, violin II (Lim, Sørensen)
no. 10, Der Zauberlehrling no. 15, White on White
Laura Albers, violin (Hosokawa)
no. 11, En Suspens no. 16, Pour Irina
Benjamin Simon, viola
no. 13, L’escalier du diable no. 17, A bout de souffle
Stephen Harrison, cello (Lim, Sørensen)
no. 18, Canon
Leighton Fong, cello (Hosokawa,
Maldonado) Lucille Chung, piano
Richard Worn, contrabass
Julie Steinberg, piano
Daniel Kennedy, percussion
~ INTERMISSION ~

TOSHIO HOSOKAWA
Slow Dance (1996, 2002)
Lucille Chung’s performance is made possible by a generous grant from the Ross
McKee Foundation. BENT SØRENSEN
The Lady and the Lark (1997)
This performance of Bent Sorensen’s The Lady and the Lark is made possible in five movements
in part by a grant from the American-Scandinavian Foundation. United States premiere

Benjamin Simon, viola

This concert is made possible in part by grants from Hitachi America Ltd. and
the Hitachi Foundation.
JAVIER TORRES MALDONADO
Claroscuros (2001)
United States premiere

I. Voz Oscura (Dark Voice)

II. Antiphonie-Aurae (Antiphonies-Auras)
Program Notes its gestural or “calligraphic” quality and its treatment of the eight per-
formers as “a single instrument...as if they were the incredibly com-
plex, subtle resonances of a gigantic gong.” Koto was created through
LIZA LIM (B. 1966) an intense collaboration with Australia’s contemporary music ensem-
ble ELISION that began in 1986 and continues to have an impact on

I
n a 2001 lecture at the Sydney Opera House, Liza Lim comment- her most important works, including both her operas, Oresteia and
ed that “as an Australian composer with a South-east Asian Moon Spirit Feasting. A collaborative approach also characterizes Lim’s
Chinese background, you could perhaps say that I straddle the impressive multimedia projects, which reached a culmination during
East-West boundary of Australian musical identity politics in quite a the mid-1990s in a series of site-specific installations created with
different way.... I am aware that the ‘hyphenated identity,’ Asian- visual artist Domenico de Clario and extensive work with video artist
Australian, positions me quite differently in relation to acts of cultural Judith Wright that led to the installation Sonorous Bodies (1999), which
borrowing. The relationships between notions of where I am and was created for the Queensland Art Gallery’s Asia Pacific Triennial
where I look towards are, I think, less stable, more contingent, more and has since traveled around the world.
ambivalent.” Perhaps paradoxically, in Lim’s case this “ambivalence”
yields compositions of striking power and certainty, grounded in the Lim acknowledges influences that reach far beyond her Chinese-
physicality of musical performance and the conviction that music is Australian upbringing. One of her first major works, The Garden of
uniquely able to cross cultural boundaries. Earthly Desire (1988-89) took its inspiration from the paintings of
Hironymous Bosch; her duo for cello and clarinet Inguz (Fertility)
Lim’s education was Australian; she earned degrees from the draws on the modal theory and musical structures of India; other
Universities of Melbourne and Queensland, Lim has studied with works have incorporated the writings of the Greek poetess Sappho,
Richard Hames, Riccardo Formosa, and Ton de Leeuw. Yet her the novelist Italo Calvino, and (like the work on tonight’s program)
career is an international one and among her recent works is the large- the mystic poet Rumi. Nonetheless, in recent years she has been
scale orchestral piece Ecstatic Architecture, commissioned by the Los increasingly attracted to Chinese themes out of an awareness of her
Angeles Philharmonic for their inaugural season in the Walt Disney dual perspective as a cultural “insider” living “outside” the Chinese
Concert Hall, designed by Frank Gehry. Taking inspiration from mainland. In her opera YuP Ling Jié (Moon Spirit Feasting), she
Gehry’s innovative “rhythmic curves,” Lim’s own work involves “curl- evokes the world of street opera that combines ancient Chinese the-
ing, interweaving shapes” and an interplay between instruments and ater with “Malaysian Chinese vaudeville, Bangkok strip shows, Hong
their surroundings that can be surprisingly literal in its conception. Kong martial arts movies, and street-side trance rituals.” More recent-
She envisioned “a moment of recognition” between the wood of ly, she contributed music to accompany a French exhibit of Chinese
each cello and the “wooden paneling of the ceiling,” a kinship archaeological treasures; the resulting Machine for Contacting the Dead
between the metal of flutes and trumpets and the building’s exterior. (2001), for twenty-seven solo instruments, asked members of the
A “roar of ear-splitting multiphonics” exalts the auditorium’s capacity Ensemble InterContemporain to form a constellation of “meta-
to let sound “fill every crevice of the hall and enter the bodies of the instruments,” with one group characterized by the resonances of a
listeners.” Chinese gong, another employing the delicate performance effects
typical for the ch'in or Chinese zither, and so forth. In every case, her
Although uniquely tied to the setting of its 2004 premiere, many fea- reliance on ancient instruments or aesthetics is renewed by her atten-
tures of Ecstatic Architecture reflect long-standing preoccupations for tion to present-day resources, for, as she puts it, “Working against fixi-
Lim, especially in its imaginative treatment of the instrumental ty and stagnation of identity in the in-between spaces of creative
ensemble. Her 1993 piece Koto, for example, is a landmark work for action, one finds an infinite momentum for creative renewal.”

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thought of the piece as music that grows organically from this initial
Lim has received commissions from the Arditti String Quartet, melody (the interior quality of a melody singing to itself) which
Ensemble InterContemporain, Ensemble Modern, ELISION, Synergy ‘pecks’ its way out into a succession of musical spaces.”
Percussion, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the BBC and ABC
Orchestras, among others. Radio Bremen and Westdeutscher From the opening melodic evocation to the quiet coda with its violin
Rundfunk have devoted concerts entirely to her music. In addition to incantation, the sonic spaces that Lim creates are shaped into a loose-
winning an Australia Council Fellowship and an APRA-Australian ly sectional structure by gradual changes in the density of musical
Music Centre Classical Music Award for Best Composition, she has events. Like lines of poetry, each instrumental line has its own syntax
served as guest lecturer at the Darmstadt Summer Music Courses and but also interacts with those around it in a play of shifting allusions
Cornell University and has participated in the 2000 U. C. San Diego and alliances. Sometimes these relationships reflect a similarity in
SEARCH symposium. Her ritual street opera Moon Spirit Feasting, which instrument family (strings or winds) or register (low or high range);
was premiered at the 2000 Adelaide Festival, has received four seasons sometimes the dialogues they suggest are harder to characterize. In
of repeat performances at the Melbourne Festival, Berlin's Hebbel every case, the performers are called upon to inflect their utterances
Theater, Zurich Theater Spektakel, and the Saitama Arts Center in with a compendium of performance nuances, suggesting a highly
Japan. She has recently won a Paul Lowin Award for Ecstatic inflected speech whose mystic connotations address more than just
Architecture, and in 2005, the Festival d’automne (Paris) will feature the ear. As Lim has observed, Rumi’s poems “often contain musical
three of her newest works: In the Shadow’s Light, written for the Kairos references, particularly the image of the relationship between a musi-
Quartet; The Quickening, for soprano Deborah Kayser and ch’in player cian and their musical instrument as a metaphor for how human
Yang Chunwei; and Mother Tongue, a major work for soprano and beings are vehicles through which spirit moves. He often describes
ensemble commissioned jointly by the Ensemble InterContemporain, the intimacy that a musician has with an instrument as an erotic rela-
Elision, and Fest d’Automne. She is currently working on a piece co- tionship—a lover’s relationship of many subtle touches, breaths and a
commissioned by the Sydney Symphony, where she will be Composer- dancing of the body.”
in-Residence from 2005-07 and on a commission for the San
Francisco Contemporary Music Players, supported by a grant from
the Fromm Foundation.

The Heart's Ear (1997)

for flute, clarinet, two violins, viola, and cello

Commissioned by the Australia Ensemble, The Heart’s Ear builds upon

Arabic-Turkish-Islamic music. According to the composer, “Both the
title of the work and the musical influences reflect a long-standing
personal interest that I have in Sufi poetry and in particular, that of
the 13th-century mystic poet, Jelaluddin Rumi. It begins with a very
brief fragment of a Sufi melody as a way of evoking that gift-like
quality of attention. To quote from another of Rumi’s poems, the
melody is ‘like birdsong beginning inside an egg’—a beautiful image
of something nascent, about to open out into a larger world. I’ve

6 7
view, “My idea was that instead of tension-resolution, dissonance-
GYÖRGY LIGETI (B. 1923) consonance, and other such pairs of opposition in traditional tonal
music, I would contrast ‘mistiness’ with passages of ‘clearing up.’

O
‘Mistiness’ usually means a contrapuntal texture, a micropolyphonic
f the composers on our concert program, Ligeti’s career was cobweb technique.” Ligeti transferred his “micropolyphony”to a
most profoundly transformed by personal and stylistic vocal medium with impressive effect in his famous Lux Aeterna (1966)
migrations, which in his case were shaped by mid-twentieth-century for sixteen soloists and chorus—a work made famous by its appear-
upheavals in the politics of his native Hungary and of Europe at ance in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
large. Unlike his father and brother, Ligeti survived the concentration
camps of World War II. He and went to Budapest in 1945, where he After making a name for himself in the avant-garde during the sixties,
studied with Ferenc Farkas and Sandor Veress among others, inherit- however, Ligeti gradually changed course, finding (or recovering) an
ing from them a love both for Bartók and for folk music. Though he appreciation for more conventional sounds and textures. As musicol-
wrote a great deal during these years, he disavowed many of these ogist Paul Griffiths puts it, “all kinds of memories began to float on
works as “prehistoric” and artificially isolated from what he later con- the surface: consonant chords, melodies that might suggest folk song
sidered the modernist mainstream of Western Europe. Like Veress, (especially Hungarian folk song), pulsed rhythms.” Perhaps, he was
he eventually chose to emigrate to the West rather than complying building on his works like his Second String Quartet (1968) which
with the artistic demands of a socialist government. In the fall of makes many allusions to music of the past. Perhaps he was exploring
1956, as Hungarian intellectuals pushed for a more flexible commu- the similarities between the shapes of his micropolyphonic works and
nism whose priorities would be set in Budapest rather than Moscow, the compositional processes created by American ‘minimalist’ com-
Ligeti was secretly studying music by such “bourgeois” composers as posers such as Terry Riley or Steve Reich, whose music he encoun-
Arnold Schoenberg and Karlheinz Stockhausen. When Soviet tanks tered while serving as a Visiting Professor at Stanford University in
put an end to the attempted “revolution,” the aftermath was terrifying 1972. In any case, his music became much more eclectic in style and
for intellectuals with any liberal leanings, and Ligeti planned a dramat- technique. The opera Le Grand Macabre (1974-77), recently performed
ic escape—crossing into Austria on foot in the dead of winter—that by the San Francisco Opera, subsumes allusions to Monteverdi,
would forever color perceptions of his character and career. Rossini, and Verdi together with traffic noises, Schumann, Offenbach,
and so many other sources that Ligeti himself has referred to the
Wihin a few months of his arrival in the West, Ligeti was already opera as a kind of musical “flea market.”
working with electronics at the forefront of new music research in
Cologne—for a while he even lived in Stockhausen’s apartment. Two Since the mid-1970s, Ligeti has acknowledged a vast variety of influ-
tape pieces, Glissandi (1957) and Artikulation (1958), illustrate his ences, from the classic repertoire (Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, and
experiments with layering and distortion—experiments that he soon especially Conlon Nancarrow's experiments with player piano music),
carried into the realm of non-electronic orchestral music in the works to world music (African drumming, Balinese percussion music), to
that made him internationally famous: Apparitions (1958-59) and jazz (Thelonius Monk, Bill Evans), to fractal mathematics. With his
Atmospheres (1961). In these pieces, melody and rhythm are blurred two harpsichord works of 1978, Passacaglia Ungherese and Hungarian
beyond recognition through the creation of “sound complexes” or Rock, he even reconnected with elements of his pre-1956 existence:
“clusters” made up of many independent but overlapping musical traditional forms and the asymmetrical rhythms of Hungarian folk
lines. The intensity of these clusters waxes and wanes, but their pre- music (as understood by a composer now familiar with jazz, Latin
cise pitches and rhythms remain obscure and often cannot be cap- American music, and rock). These reincorporations of familiar
tured in normal music notation. As Ligeti remarked in a 1978 inter- sounds suggest not a retreat from the avant garde but a rebirth of

8 9
interest in conventionally communicative music. To quote Griffiths grouped into three Books of six, eight, and four pieces, respectively.
again, “Whereas once in Eastern Europe these [basic musical materi- Together they represent his very latest compositions, written two and
als] were imposed...as elements of a state policy of ‘music for the in some cases even three decades after many of his best known
people,’ now they come sounding from the ethnic music of the world. works.
And the lesson Mr. Ligeti draws from this international chorus is salu-
tary: not that we must return to some presumed tradition, but rather Few pianists have attempted, let alone mastered, the rhythmic intrica-
that the basic data of music can be taken up again and reinterpreted, cies of these magisterial etudes, and we are lucky to have one of their
in works that belong to no tradition except that of humanity in gener- foremost exponents, Lucille Chung, performing for us tonight. Ligeti
al.” himself has observed that the intricate rhythms and flamboyant ges-
tures of his keyboard collections respond to the player piano pieces
Since 1964, when Apparitions won him first prize at the ISCM of composer Conlon Nancarrow, the polyrhythms of Africa drum-
Composition Competition in Rome and he was made a member of ming (perhaps filtered through American minimalism), the etchings of
the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, each decade has brought Ligeti Escher, and even the complexities of fractal mathematics. “Der
new honors and new champions among the most prestigious of per- Zauberlehrling” (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice), “En Suspens” (In
forming ensembles. He has been made a member of many distin- Suspense), and “L’escalier du diable,” all drawn from Book 2, treat
guished societies—Berlin’s Akademie der Künste (1968), the their audiences to three different kinds of exuberant and evocative
American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the display: the magical textures of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” the gen-
International Society for New Music (1984), and the Ordre National tly rhapsodic “In Suspense” (dedicated to György Kurtág and meant
des Arts et Lettres (1988). The titles of his many awards testify to his to be played “with the elegance of swing”), and the series of giddy
truly international acclaim: Koussevitzky Foundation Prize, Beethoven ascents that trace the vertiginous “Devil’s Staircase.”
Prize (Bonn), first place at the International UNESCO Competition,
the Bach Prize (Hamburg), the Ravel and Honegger Prizes (Paris), the The four etudes of Book 3 (1995-2001) were all commissioned by
Béla Bartók-Ditta Pasztory Prize, the Grawemeyer Award from the important musical institutions: the Aja Royal Conservatory, the
University of Louisville, the Austrian State Prize, Japan’s Praemium Donaueschingen Festival, the BBC, and Radio France. Perhaps for
Imperiale, and the Ernst von Siemens Prize of Munich. After many this reason, or perhaps because they fall later in Ligeti’s evolving
productive years in Hamburg, Germany, Ligeti currently lives in career, they are more introverted, steadier, and less descriptive (but no
Vienna. less difficult) than their earlier counterparts. Etudes 15 and 16,
“White on White” and “Pour Irina” (For Irina), offer initial slow sec-
tions followed by “fingery” fast sections, recalling the age-old ‘Prelude
Piano Etudes (1988-2001) and Toccata’ with which a keyboardist might greet a new instrument.
In a way, “A bout de souffle” (Out of breath) and “Canon” reverse
Book 3 and excerpts from Book 2
this process, but their closing chords barely attempt to contain the
momentum built up by each etude’s ecstatic, perpetuum mobile.
The ‘etude’ or ‘exercise’ has been a viable vehicle for concert pianists
ever since the famous works of Chopin and Liszt. Yet few twentieth-
century composers seem to have felt at home with the genre and its
challenges, which often involve infusing repeated patterns with
melodic interest and making a virtuosic virtue of regularity. Ligeti did
not approach the etude until relatively late in his career, but since
1985 he has composed a total of eighteen magnificent ‘exercises,’

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(1989, revised 2001, for soloists, narrators, chorus, tape, and orches-
tra), and a related, three-part Hiroshima Requiem with movements titled
TOSHIO HOSOKAWA (B. 1955) “Preludio ‘Night’” (1989, for orchestra), “Death and Resurrection”
(1989, for narrators, soloists, orchestra, and choir), and “Dawn”

“M
y music is calligraphy,” writes Toshio Hosokawa, (1992, for orchestra). While one might expect these works to convey
“painted onto the blank slate of time and space. the horrors of atomic destruction, Hosokawa has chosen instead to
Every single note has a shape, like...brush dwell on his own memories of the postwar city, in the midst of
strokes...painted on the canvas of silence.” Hosokawa’s music, both regeneration and unprecedented contact with western culture.
gestural and communicative, embodies a unique fusion of influences
that has made him one of the best-known Japanese composers after Hosokawa’s multicultural ties have perhaps made him particularly sen-
Toru Takemitsu. sitive to the intricacies of languages and alphabets. In his choral
work, Ave Maria (1991), one of his mostly explicitly ‘western’ works,
A native of Hiroshima, Hosokawa traverses a truly global world of he moves from unintelligible phonemes and syllables to the traditional
music; he now divides his time between Tokyo and Mainz. He stud- Latin text, over a taped background meant to evoke human breath.
ied piano and composition in Japan before moving to Germany in In New Seeds of Contemplation (1986, revised 1995), he combines the
1976, where he participated in the Darmstadt Summer Music Courses stately sounds of a gagaku ensemble with the syllables of shomyo
in 1980. Along with this grounding in contemporary music, he was (Buddhist) chant, and his chamber opera, Visions of Lear has been
fortunate to find teachers who encouraged him to explore traditional praised for its variety of vocal declamation styles and the compelling
elements of Japanese music, particularly the diverse tone colors and connections Hosokawa draws between Shakespeare’s play and the life
melodic styles of the court music gagaku. In West Berlin, he worked of a businessman in contemporary Japan.
primarily with the Korean-born political exile Isang Yun at the
Hochshule der Künste in West Berlin; his teachers in Freiburg includ- Hosokawa’s honors reflect the internationality of his career, including
ed Klaus Huber and Brian Ferneyhough. prizes from the Valentino Bucchi competition, the centennial compe-
tition of the Berlin Philharmonic, the Arion Music Prize, the
“I lean strongly toward Europe,” Hosokawa observes, “but at the Composition Prize of the Young Generation in Europe, the Kyoto
same time I feel bound to Japanese traditions and I create my music and Osaka Prizes, and the Musica Viva Prize. His music has been fea-
on the bases of Japan’s long cultural traditions. Here are my spiritual tured at festivals in Paris, Vienna, Venice, Munich, Salzburg, Helsinki,
and psychic roots.” Many of the compositions in his catalog, includ- and dozens of other cities. From 1989 to 1998, Hosokawa served as
ing Koto-uta (1999, for voice and koto) feature Japanese instruments, Artistic Director of the annual Akiyoshidai International
and he has fostered collaborative relationships with such instrumental- Contemporary Music Seminar in southern Japan. Since 1998, he has
ists as Mayumi Miyata, master of the sho or Japanese mouth organ. been Composer in Residence with the Tokyo Symphony, and in 2001
Even works using western instruments tend to adopt and adapt ele- he was elected a member of the Berlin Akademie der Künste.
ments of Japanese performance practice, including microtones, a vari- Among his recent works are the opera Hanjo, which received its pre-
ety of string plucking techniques, half-blown pitches on woodwind miere at the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, and two scores for films
instruments, and a diverse pantheon of percussion. Not surprisingly, directed by Kohei Oguri: Shi no Toge (Sting of Death) and Nemuru
many of the pieces in Hosokawa’s catalogue with the strongest ties to Otoko (Sleeping Man). Hosokawa visited California in 2003 when he
Japan take their inspiration from his native city. In recent years he has was invited by U. C. San Diego’s Center for Research in Computing
added to a growing cycle of Hiroshima pieces that currently includes and the Arts to participate in a symposium devoted to artistic collabo-
Memory of the Sea (Hiroshima Symphony), Voiceless Voice in Hiroshima ration and cross-cultural fusion. In addition to giving a lecture on
Noh opera and a seminar devoted to his new work Voiceless Voice in
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Hiroshima, the composer also heard performances of three of his solo BENT SØRENSEN (B. 1958)

A
pieces-Sen VI for percussion, Vertical Song I for flute, and Nacht Klänge
lthough Bent Sørensen’s career has been closely identified with his
for piano—as well as the work we will hear tonight, Slow Dance.
home country of Denmark, his music suggests a reaching across
Scandinavian borders and into those regions of the imagination that
deal with things past. According to Andreas Beyer, an authority on
Slow Dance (1996, revised 2002) Sørensen, “The composer plays on our understanding of time and our col-
for flute/alto flute, clarinet, percussion, piano, violin, and cello lective memory trail. One gets the feeling that one has heard his music
before, only in another way and from another place. As an echo of some-
In many ways, Hosokawa’s sextet Slow Dance is a celebration of the thing that was once real and present. The goddess of memory, Mnemosyne,
two primary streams of influence on his music. The piece was com- is Sørensen's guiding star.”
missioned by the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in
Darmstadt for the fiftieth anniversary of the Darmstadt Summer Sørensen began his musical career at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in
Music Courses and dedicated to Robert HP PLATZ and the Copenhagen, studying composition with Ib Nørholm. His earliest works
Ensemble Köln, who gave its premiere in 1996. Yet the piece displays incorporated folk-like melodies, but with a series of string quartets—Alman
the keen attention to performance nuance that characterizes gagaku (1983-84), Adieu (1986), and Angels’ Music (1987-88)—he began to develop a
and the performing practices of many Japanese instruments. more individual idiom, based on his gift for capturing visual images and
fragmentary narratives in sound. With these successful chamber works
Rather than employing koto (zither), shamisen (Japanese lute), or under his belt, he traveled from Copenhagen to Aarhus, where he studied
shakuhachi (end-blown flute), Hosokawa calls for western instruments, with his renowned countryman Per Nørgård from 1988-90, and since that
but he also provides them with no less than fifty-three distinct sym- time Sørensen has emerged as the leading Danish composer of his genera-
bols representing different types of articulation or extended perform- tion.
ing techniques, all of which are entabulated at the beginning of the
score. Flutist and clarinetist must execute multiphonics (producing Much of Sørensen’s music involves the quiet end of the dynamic spectrum
more than one sound through unconventional fingering or blowing and a variety of performance gestures ranging from the subtlest nuances of
techniques), flutter-tonguing, slapping of the keys, and whistle tones; articulation to gentle thickets of polyphonic imitation to ornaments, micro-
the percussionist is active with a variety of sticks and other imple- tonal inflections, and glissandi (slides). In Tuchins (1986, for pairs of cellos,
ments; the pianist should strike and brush the strings (not just the trombones, and electric guitars), he achieves what he calls “a constantly
keys), sometimes inhaling and exhaling on cue; and the string players shaking movement” through “trills that turn into very fast staccato move-
respond to such directives as “play almost on the bridge more noise ments, which glide in and out of each other all the time.” There is some-
than sound” and “produce noise like wind.” While certain passages thing systematic about his treatment of the continuum between staccato and
of Slow Dance are unified by the recurrence of a focal pitch, on the legato, and about his exploration of the intervals slightly larger and slightly
whole the piece creates the impression of continuously unfolding smaller than the ‘major’ and ‘minor’ thirds of the piano keyboard. Some
action—perhaps a ritual, perhaps a dance, but a dance addressed to commentators have even linked the intricacy of his music to the complexi-
minds and ears as well as bodies. ties of 20th-century twelve-tone writing, but Sørensen himself prefers to
acknowledge the older influences of dreams, nature, and the visual arts,
including the pointillism of Seurat, the Renaissance illuminations of Jean
Fouquet of Tours, and the 18th-century engravings of Giovanni Battista
Piranesi.

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15
Although Sørensen’s sounds are wholly modern, the composer shows a spe-
cial fondness for established religious imagery and some of the favorite
themes of nineteenth-century romanticism, as Beyer has observed. In addi-
The Lady and the Lark (1997)
for solo viola, flute/piccolo/alto flute, E-flat/A-clarinet,
tion to works based on Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott (1987, for solo viola)
two violins, and cello
and Poe’s Masque of the Red Death (1998, for solo piano), his pieces frequently
explore fragments or ruins, absence and longing, and the inevitability of
Dedicated to Norway’s Cikada Ensemble, Sørensen’s The Lady and the Lark,
death and decline. In his choral work Echoing Garden (1990-92), for example,
bears a delicate relationship to other works in his oeuvre. According to the
he has chosen texts from Shakespeare, Rilke, and Albert Cohen’s novel Belle
composer, “The title refers partly to my piece The Lady of Shalott for solo
du Seigneur and placed them in a musical context laden with overlapping
viola (to which the new piece is a rather belated ‘big sister’) and partly to the
melodies and temporal distortions to suggest the intertwining of plants and
two ‘lark-like’ cadenzas which constitute the second and fourth movements.”
the wistful sighs of unrequited love. Similar spirits haunt his Violin
Like the “pseudo-nightingale cadenza” of his piece for trombone and
Concerto, Sterbende Gärten (Dying Garden) (1993), in which smooth unison
ensemble, Birds and Bells, the birdsong of The Lady and the Lark is both natu-
melodies are gradually distorted as Sørensen imposes glissandi, echoes, and
ralistic and fantastic—more stylized and less realistic than, for example,
suspended notes to create a picturesque entropy.
Olivier Messiaen’s birdsong, but still able to evoke multiple, distinct species.
The decaying garden finds a musical equivalent in one of Sørensen’s favorite
The composer calls this work “a ‘mini’-viola concerto in five short move-
sound sources, bells, which make an obvious impact on Birds and Bells (1995,
ments,” and both parts of his designation are apt. Each movement is indeed
for trombone and chamber ensemble), but which also resonate in his sextet
a magical miniature, and the violist is clearly the focus of attention, initiating
Deserted Churchyards (1990) and the more recent piano solo Shadows of Silence
the ethereal lyricism of the outer movements, participating in the bird calls
(2003-04). It seems likely that the wonderfully complex process of sound
of movements two and four, and waxing rhapsodic in the longest, central
dispersal after a bell is struck will remain an important source of inspiration,
movement. Harmonics and double-stops, glissandi and woodblocks add
for it unites Sørensen’s preoccupations with beauty and decay. “When I
their nuances to each chapter of the story—and it does seem to be a story, if
compose music,” he notes, “I actually work with something that is very
a rather enigmatic one. As Anders Beyer writes, “Bent Sørensen’s music is
beautiful, but I am always on the brink of breaking it down. The trick of it
always about something, even though one cannot say exactly what. There
is. . . finding exactly the right time where there is a perfect balance between
are ardent lovers, sad processions on the way to the cemetery, mute women
the pure and the beautiful on the one hand and on the other something vio-
with upturned eyes of female saints. . . angel pictures, blurred images, out-
lent, ugly, that is tearing this beauty away from the surface, so it is cracking
lines of the richness in detail of a time past. . . Music on the edge of
or peeling off.”
silence.”
Sørensen’s commissions have included works for Ensemble Modern, the
London Sinfonietta, Norway’s BIT-20 Ensemble, the Lerchenborg Festival, JAVIER TORRES MALDONADO
the Sonanza Ensemble, and the Arditti String Quartet, among others. In
1996, he won the Nordic Council Prize for Sterbende Gärten, which was com- (B. 1968)
missioned by the Aarhus Symphony, but premiered by the Danish Radio

I
Symphony Orchestra with soloist Rebecca Hirsch during the Nordic Music
n a 2001 interview, Javier Torres Maldonado observed, “No artist exists
Days. In 1998, he was appointed Honorary Composer in Association by the
locked up in a crystal sphere, and this is a constant for the great artistic
Esbjerg Ensemble. His recent works include the massive opera Under the Sky
works of all periods. The content of a work, if it is profound, is the
(2003), the result of a five-year collaboration with Danish playwright Peter
product of a consciousness that is always bound to philosophical ideas,
Asmussen in response to a commission from the Royal Theatre in
social events, and traditions.” Like the other composers on tonight’s pro-
Copenhagen.
gram, Torres Maldonado combines an awareness of his own heritage with

16 17
an openness to international influences and a commitment to seeking out
new sounds.
Torres Maldonado has received an international array of honors
Torres Maldonado was born in Chetumal, Mexico and studied at the Mexico including the Queen Maria Jose Prize of Geneva, Italy’s Alfredo
National Conservatory and the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan. Casella and CittB di Barletta Awards, and the Concours International
After completing his degree in 1996, he took advanced composition classes “Ad Referendum II” of Canada. He won second prize in two succes-
with Franco Donatoni and Azio Corghi at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena, sive Mozart Competitions in Salzburg (1997 and 2000) as well as a
the Accademia Superiore di Musica “L. Perosi,” and the Accademia Mozart Medal from the governments of Austria and Mexico. In
Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. He also studied at the Conservatory of 2003, he received a commission from the Ensemble La Pluma de Hu
Strasbourg with Ivan Fedele, whose piece Maja, for soprano and ensemble, for a work to be played at Syntono and Citéculture’s first symposium
was performed by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players earlier devoted to composer-performer collaboration, and in 2004 he was
this season. In 2003, he earned a diploma from the Giuseppe Verdi invited by the French Ensemble Aleph to be Composer-in-Residence
Conservatory for his work in electronic music, and in 2004 he was one of at festivals in Normandy, Amsterdam, Dresden, and Paris. Torres
ten composers asked to participate in the “Stage de Composition et Maldonado’s music has been played by the Divertimento Ensemble,
Informatique Musicale” at the prestigious Parisian center for computer- Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, and the Ex Novo Ensemble, among oth-
music research, IRCAM. ers, and he has received commissions from contemporary music festi-
vals in Venice, Siena, New York, Strasbourg, and Erl (where the
Much of Torres Maldonado’s music, including the piece we will hear tonight, Tirolerfestspiele devoted two concerts to his music in 2000 and 2002).
explores innovative ways of organizing time and space. For example, in his Among his most recent commissions are an orchestral piece for
brief duo for flute and percussion, Reflejo Espiral (2000) he uses layered pul- Gustav Kuhn and the Haydn Orchestra (to be premiered in Italy this
sation patterns and “metric modulation” (in which subdivisions of a steady April), and pieces for violinist Carlo Chiarappa (with bass clarinet solo
pulse are regrouped to suggest a new meter) to create an aural analog to the and the Dynamis Ensemble), guitarist Pablo Márquez, and accordion-
distorting process of reflection. At times, the composer harnesses these ist Germano Scurti (with electronics). Torres Maldonado was recent-
abstract compositional concerns in the service of an overtly political or ly elected a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte of
social message. One of his best known pieces, Exabrupto (1998), uses com- Mexico. He currently teaches electronic music composition at the
plicated polymeters and superimpositions in a tribute to the native Mexican Alessandria Conservatory in Italy and serves as the Artistic Director
victims of a massacre in Acteal, Chiapas. Commissioned by the University of the Dynamis Ensemble.
of Montreal and Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, it won the Musicians’ Prize
after its premiere during their International Forum for Young Composers.
Claroscuros (2001)
In 2002, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players performed his for clarinet/bass clarinet, bass clarinet, trombone, cello, contrabass
Figuralmusik II, the central panel in a triptych of works (1996-1998) that
plays on patterns of visual and aural perception. According to the compos- Although Claroscuros does not require electronics for its performance,
er, the cycle “originates from the fascination that I have always felt for per- Torres Maldonado links its creation to his exposure to computers and
ceptive illusions, translated into impossible objects in physical reality, and, the insights they yield into “complex sound spectra and their possible
above all, for the results of the interlacing planes and perspectives used by metamorphoses.” Noting that Claroscuros itself consists of a pair of
Piranesi and Escher.” Expanding, contracting, and transforming a limited potentially freestanding pieces, he writes, “The title refers to the con-
number of fundamental gestures, he changes the listener’s sense of perspec- stant search for contrast evident in the instrumental and formal char-
tive through a rapid juxtaposition of different temporal schemes—fluctua- acter of the two pieces that make up the set. The first piece, Voz
tions in tempo and meter, but also changes in the relative density or scarcity Oscura (Dark Voice), is characterized by the constant presence of frag-
of musical events. ments of a long melody that pass from one instrument to another (at

18 19
times perceivably, at times not); actually this melody is present in the Pre-C
Concert Speaker
entire piece, but in some sections it undergoes various manipulations

C
that alter its temporal evolution. The predominating image corre- harles Boone, composer and lecturer, was born in Cleveland
sponds to a voice that tries to sing through the instruments of the in 1939, and studied music in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and
ensemble. But the allusions contained in this first part also include Vienna. After arriving in the Bay Area in 1963, he was associ-
characteristic elements of certain Latin American music, almost ated for many years with the Composers’ Forum and the Mills
dream-like allusions since their object is filtered down to its essential Performing Group. In 1971, he founded the BYOP (Bring Your Own
elements.” Pillow) concert series, which later evolved into the San Francisco
Contemporary Music Players. Mr. Boone’s own compositions have
Unlike Voz Oscura, in which computer-generated algorithms help turn been performed by the San Francisco Symphony, the Los Angeles
a melody into a sequence of irregular fragments, the three sections of Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the Oakland Symphony, the
Antiphonae-Aurae (separated by scalar passagework), represent a grad- Mexican National Orchestra, and the Nouvel Orchestre
ual increase in musical continuity. This move from antiphonal dia- Philharmonique of Paris. His works have been featured at the New
logue to more cooperative progress takes place in a sonic framework Music America, Ojai, Cabrillo, Juilliard, Aspen, Avignon, Berlin and
full of unusual nuances. As the composer points out, “Antiphonae- Music Today/Tokyo Festivals, and notable conductors and performers
Aurae demands considerable virtuosity of the performers, although include Seiji Ozawa, Edo de Waart, Michael Tilson Thomas, and
absolutely without showing off, since during almost all the piece the Phyllis Bryn-Julson. Mr. Boone has received a number of commis-
five players must play at a dynamic level from pianississimo to piano, sions, including three NEA grants. He has also lived as a composer-in-
rarely reaching a mezzopiano as a maximum. All this, in a region that residence guest of the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst
goes from the high to the very high register of each instrument and (DAAD) in Berlin. He is currently a professor at the San Francisco
includes a considerable number of microtonal pitches or natural har- Art Institute.
monics. . . The resulting sonority is without doubt highly individual.”
—Program notes by Beth Levy
Featured Performers

L
ucille Chung is an internationally renowned pianist who has
been a featured soloist with such groups as the Montreal
Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Moscow Virtuosi,
the BBC National Orchestra, the Orquesta Sinfonica de Tenerife, and
other orchestras around the globe. Her teachers have included
Seymour Lipkin, Karlheinz Kämmerling, Lazar Berman, and Joaquín
Achúcarro, and she has worked closely with composer and conductor
Krzysztof Penderecki, among others. Chung has given recitals at
London’s Wigmore Hall, the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall,
Toronto's Ford Centre for the Performing Arts, and the Amsterdam
Concertgebouw. Her solo playing has garnered honors from the
Stravinsky International Piano Competition (1989), the Montreal
International Music Competition, and the International Franz Liszt
Competition, as well as an Outstanding Achievement Award from
Canada’s Governor General, and an Honors Diploma from the

20 21
Accademia Chigiana in Siena, Italy. Praised for “combining vigor and Music Director
suppleness with natural eloquence and elegance,” Chung has recorded

D
award-winning CDs of music of Scriabin and all three Books of avid Milnes is a conductor of extraordinary breadth and
Ligeti’s Piano Etudes. long-standing commitment to contemporary music. In his
early years, he studied not only piano and organ, but also

B
enjamin Simon, viola, has performed for audiences around clarinet, cello, and voice. Milnes received his undergraduate education
the world as a member of the Naumberg Award-winning New in music at SUNY Stony Brook. In 1984, at age 27, he won the pres-
World String Quartet, the Stanford String Quartet, and tigious Exxon Conductor position with the San Francisco Symphony.
Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. He has been principal violist of He remained as the Symphony’s Assistant Conductor and Music
Buffalo Philharmonic and has played in the New Century and Los Director of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra until 1986,
Angeles Chamber Orchestras, as well as the Los Angeles and New working closely with Edo de Waart and Herbert Blomstedt.
York Philharmonic Orchestras. Born in San Francisco, he is also an Following study and collaboration with such renowned conductors as
accomplished conductor, having studied locally with Denis DeCouteau Leonard Bernstein, Erich Leinsdorf, Otto-Werner Müller, and Michael
and continuing at Yale College, Juilliard, and the Aspen Music Festival. Tilson Thomas, he earned his doctorate in conducting from Yale
He has taught at Harvard and Stanford Universities and is currently University in 1989.
on the faculty at U. C. Berkeley, while also serving as Music Director
of the Palo Alto and San Francisco Chamber Orchestras. He has From 1994-2002, Milnes was Principal Guest Conductor of the
recently appeared as viola soloist with the SFCO, led Berkeley’s Latvian National Symphony Orchestra and also guest conducted
Crowden School on their third European tour, and conducted mem- numerous orchestras across the United States. He has conducted at
bers of the Berkeley Symphony in Han Krasa’s children’s opera the Tanglewood, Aspen, and Monadnock Music Festivals, and has led
Brundibar for the Jewish Music Festival. operatic repertoire ranging from Mozart to Weill. He maintains a
keen interest in jazz, which has led to appearances on jazz saxophone
with Gene Krupa, Chuck Mangione, John Pizzarelli, and Billy Taylor.
Milnes’s recording of John Anthony Lennon’s Zingari for Bridge
Records was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1994.

In 1996, Milnes joined the music faculty at the University of

California, Berkeley, where he directs its symphony orchestra and the
Berkeley Contemporary Chamber Players. He first conducted the San
Francisco Contemporary Music Players in 1997, and joined the
ensemble as Music Director in June, 2002.

22 23
The Ensemble Staff

T E
he San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP),
xecutive Director Adam Frey obtained his B.A. in Music
now in its 34th year, is a leader among America’s most distin- from Harvard University, and his M.B.A. from the University
guished and successful chamber music organizations, per- of California, Berkeley, with emphasis on marketing and plan-
forming, commissioning, and recording the music of today’s com- ning. He joined the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players in
posers. The group presents works written for both large and small 1991 after six years with Sherman, Clay Co., then the nation’s largest
chamber ensembles. SFCMP is an nine-time winner of the presti- keyboard instrument retailer, where he was Vice President in charge
gious national ASCAP/Chamber Music America Award for of Merchandising. He serves on the Board of Governors of the
Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music, having commis- C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. Mr. Frey is also a writer; his
sioned 66 pieces and performed over 1,000 new works, including 49 work has been published in The Mississippi Review.
U.S. and 126 world premieres.

D
irector of Operations and Marketing Matt Schumaker stud-
Each season the ensemble performs a subscription series at the Yerba ied music at Dartmouth and at Princeton, where he received
Buena Center for the Arts. It has also toured widely throughout an MA in composition. While at Princeton, he coordinated
California, with performances on such concert series as San concert production for the university’s new music ensemble. He sub-
Francisco Performances, Cal Performances, the Stern Grove Festival, sequently studied composition in Holland with Louis Andriessen. He
the Other Minds Festival, Los Angeles’ Monday Evening Concerts, joined the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players’ staff in
the Ojai Festival, and the Festival of New American Music in September, 2004.
Sacramento. SFCMP made its European debut at the Cheltenham

D
Festival of Music in 1986 and its East Coast debut at the Library of evelopment Associate Steven Heimerle grew up in the sub-
Congress in 2001. The ensemble has recorded eight albums of its urbs of Chicago, and was trained as an architect at Iowa
own and contributed to eight others. Its musical outreach programs State University. His primary role during tenures with archi-
have involved masterclasses, performance demonstrations, and an tectural firms in Chicago, Costa Mesa, Palo Alto and San Francisco
evening course for adults. was in marketing. Since 1995 he has worked for the Oakland and
Berkeley symphonies, Shanti, The Friends of the SF Public Library,
and the San Francisco Maritime Park Association—in marketing and
development roles. Steve is a writer, photographer, collage artist and
builder of handmade cards and books. He joined the San Francisco
Contemporary Music Players in March, 2004.

24 25
Symphony on three Da Capo CDs that include Sterbende Gärten and
Additional Listening and Reading Echoing Garden; Shadowland, Deserted Churchyards, and other works; and
the String Quartets Alman, Adieu, and Angels’ Music.) Readers may
Australia’s Elision Ensemble and Ensemble Modern have recently also wish to consult the interviews and musical excerpts available at
released a CD devoted to works by Liza Lim including The Heart’s Ear, <http://www.4komponister.dk/english>.
Street of Crocodiles, Voodoo Child, Inguz (Fertility), Koto, and The
Alchemical Wedding (ABC Classics). Other available recordings include The Nouvel Ensemble Moderne has recorded Javier Torres
the Elision Ensemble’s rendering of The Oresteia and Garden of Earthly Maldonado’s Exabrupto under the direction of Lorraine Vaillancourt
Desire (Ricordi) and a CD of chamber music performed by Zurich’s (Amberola, UMMUS; FORUM 98). His fortepiano work Orier is rep-
Ensemble für Neuen Musik (HatArt). resented on a CD containing works awarded Mozart Prizes during
1997-99 (Mozarteum in Salzburg, ORF-Radio Salzburg).
All three Books of György Ligeti’s Piano Etudes have been recorded
by Lucille Chung on two CDs along with the composer’s other piano —Beth Levy
works (Dynamic). The Horn Trio, which was most recently per-
formed by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players in 2002, is
played by members of the Ensemble InterContemporain (Erato) and
on the Sony label as part of the ongoing recording project, the
György Ligeti Edition, which compiles stellar performances of the
composer’s major works. There is limited English-language literature
for those interested in reading about Ligeti’s career. I would suggest
either the second edition of Paul Griffiths’s biography for The
Contemporary Composers Series or Richard Toop’s recent mono-
graph for the Phaidon Twentieth-Century Composers series.

Among the fine recordings of music by Toshio Hosokawa are a CD

on the Kairos label containing Koto-uta, Voyage I, the Saxophone
Concerto, and Distant Landscape II and a disc devoted to performances
of Landscape I, II, V, Vertical Time Study III, and Fragments II by mem-
bers of Arditti String Quartet in collaboration with Mayumi Miyata,
Kaoru Nakayama, Ichiro Naidura, and others (Disques Montaigne).
Memory of the Sea-Hiroshima Symphony has been recorded by the
Sapporo Symphony Orchestra under Tadaaki Otaka (Chandos) and
Hosokawa’s duo for cello and accordion, Into the Depths of Time, has
been released on the Wergo, Col Legno, Bis, and ECM labels.

Bent Sørensen’s The Lady and the Lark has been recorded by the Oslo
Sinfonietta along with The Lady of Shalott, Birds and Bells, and other
works (ECM). A fine selection of chamber and orchestral works have
been released by the Esbuerg Ensemble and the Danish Radio

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