final DMA recital, Claudia Schaer April 29, 2011. 8pm

Prospectus: From Ethereal to Sonic, for Violin

Prologue: Programme, with programme notes

~ From Etereal to Sonic: For Violin ~

Staler Center for t Ars, Stony Brook University

~

Aprl 29, 2011

8pm

~ Clauda Schaer, Violin. Final Doctorate of Musical Ars recital ~

Stony Brook Composers + 1 Perry Goldsein, Dara Semegn, Dan Weymot, Sheila Silver, Clauda Schaer, Peter Winkler, Béla Barók

wit Carol MGonnel, clarnet; Anna Khanina, piano; Elizabet York, viola; Mare Beauparlant, celo Levy Lorenzo, electronics; Peter Winkler, piano

~ Prorgramme ~

Arrested Lightning: Ten Klee Impressions

Perry Goldstein (2010)

I. Der Seilänzer The Tightrope Walker II. Engel, noch weiblich Angel, still feminine III. Gebannter Blitz Arrested Lightning IV. Ein Genius serviert ein kleines Frühstück. Engel bringt das Gewünschte A spirit serves a small breakfast. Angel brings the Desired V. Gespenst eines Genies Ghost of a Genius VI. Zauber Kunst Stück Conjuring Trick VII. Alter Klang Ancient Sound VIII. Akrobats Acrobats IX. Landschaft mit Gelben Vögeln Landscape with Yellow Birds X. Angelus Novus New Angel ~ with Carol McGonnell, clarinet; Anna Khanina, piano

Music for Violin Solo

Daria Semegen (1973)

6 Bagatelles for String Trio

Claudia Schaer (2011)

I. II. A Harmonic Piece III. Homage IV. Delayed Reaction (...un poco 'esitando) V. Allegretto quasi Moderato VI. Misterioso ~ with Elizabeth York, viola; Marie Beauparlant, cello

Sonata for Solo Violin

I. Tempo di Ciaccona II. Fuga III. Melodia IV. Presto

Béla Bartók (1944)

~ Intermission ~ This Time, This

~ with Levy Lorenzo, electronics

Daniel Allen Weymouth (1991)

Six Beads on a String, for Solo Violin

Sheila Silver (2008)

Silken Rags

Peter Winkler ~ Blue Ridge Samba

(2001)

~ Le Tango Eternel

(1985)

~ Fern Honey

(1972)

Notes on the Program Why "Ethereal to Sonic"? Where does music reside before it becomes sonic? If indeed, as Stravinsky claimed, a composer may be the channel to bring music into the light of day ... this program celebrating new music (for violin) by living composers, is titled to highlight and honour the process.

Perry Goldstein

Arrested Lightning

(2010)

Arrested Lightning is a brand-new ten-movement composition, based on ten paintings by Paul Klee, a favorite of the composer. The movements are written keeping in mind both Klee’s sharp wit, as well as the keen sense of “humour and a good-natured sense of the absurd” of the former Stony Brook clarinet student Richard Faria, for whom the work is written. Movements I, III, VI, and VIII are fast-paced “performer’s” movements, and placed to contrast with the “portrait” movements (II, IV, VII, and X), which are ethereal and otherworldly, using the theme from 17thcentury composer Thomas Tallis’s O Nata Lux (b-c-a-b, f#-g-e-f#). V, Ghost of a Genius, is a separate movement of comic relief, and IX, Yellow Birds suggests a manic din of our feathered friends.

Music for Violin Solo

Daria Semegen

(1973)

Originally conceived as a violin-piano duo, Music for Violin Solo evolved into its more concentrated version for violin solo. The piece is based on an eleven-tone series, around which the violin appears to improvise, often polyphonically with clusters and multi-voiced contrapuntal lines. The dissonances and agitated rhythms create a continuous sense of urgency and tension, with only a few points of contrasting relaxation. The work was selected by the International Society for Contemporary Music to represent the U.S. at the World Music Days Festival in Helsinki and Stockholm, and is published by the Columbia University Press. It received the George Peabody Award for its novel presentation, and is recorded by former Stony Brook student Carol Sadowski on the Opus One label.

Claudia Schaer

6 Bagatelles for String Trio

(2011)

As a new composer, schooled in plenty of techniques but just stretching my wings to try freedom, the miniature form of the Bagatelle, and the harmonic possibilities of the String Trio, are attractive as an ideal medium to try out presenting just one idea, one uninterrupted train of thought, from beginning to end, without doubt, self-reflection, or development; a nugget of form neither too daunting nor too constraining - that could go on or end, just like this sentence ....

Béla Bartók

Sonata for Solo Violin

(1944)

In 1943, Béla Bartók attended a recital by the 25-year-old Yehudi Menuhin, which included Bartók's first violin sonata, as well as Bach's C Major Sonata for Solo Violin. Bartók was very impressed by Menuhin's artistry, and accepted his commission for a Sonata for Solo Violin. It would be Bartók's final completed work: the leukemia he battled while writing it claimed him in 1945. The Sonata for Solo Violin is Bartók's only work for solo violin, and is similar in structure, as well as in metric layout, to Bach's C Major, (though the "Tempo di Ciaccona" title of the first movement is evocative of the D Minor Partita). The Sonata mixes Hungarian rhythms and modes, as well as Bartók's characteristic use of atonality and chromaticism, with the old forms and key relations. The Tempo di Ciaccona movement has emphasizes both the first

(Hungarian) and second (ciaccona) beats; the Fuga features a closely-knit atonal chromaticism, but maintains a I - V I subject-answer relationship despite; the Melodia is a slow inging movement, just as Bach's Largo in the C Major, but with a modal/atonal flavour and various harmonizations; and the final Presto begins with rhythmic buzzing quartertones, bursting into Hungarian dance song in the tempo giusto style, ending the sonata exuberantly.

Intermission

Based on its frequency of occurrence, intermission is the most popular member of repertoire. Tonight's intermission, though programmed, is in its content unprogrammed. We invite you to enjoy it, aleatorically, as you wish.

Daniel Allen Weymouth

This Time, This

(1991)

The title refers to the possibility of Another Time being Something Else: the violinist has a great deal of freedom rhythmically, and is not at all at the mercy of the electronics, which rather function as a chamber music partner, programmed with various parameters of response. Written in 1991, the piece utilizes technology developed in the 1980’s: the MAX program for MIDI (Musical Instrumental Digital Interface). It is an Object-Oriented Program, has the ability to sense pitches and react to them. Originally written for a Zeta Violin, which had a pick-up on each string, the composer adapted the piece for regular violin after the Zeta violin of the dedicatee Todd Reynolds, a Stony Brook student, was stolen. This Time, This is often paired with Another Violin, a later and still more complex work for violin and electronics

Sheila Silver

Six Beads On a String, for Solo Violin

(2008)

A theme and variations for solo violin, the piece was composed in memoriam for the composer’s father-in-law, Charles Feldman. The theme is a melody in Aeolian mode, in the style of a nigun (Jewish melody), and serves as the basis for the subsequent forays into five different worlds of sound, including a chorale and a gypsy dance; it transcends boundaries of style, character, and tonality. The piece was premiered by Yevgeny Kutik

Peter Winkler

Silken Rags

- Peter Winkler: Silken Rags is the name of the violin-piano duo I formed with my wife, Dorothea (Deede) Cook. It is also the title for an ongoing series of original works I have written or adapted for our duo. These pieces reflect our love of popular music of many kinds – ragtime, gospel music, tango, American popular song, Ghanaian highlife, etc. – and our attempt to capture the spirit and feeling of these styles within the medium of concert music for violin and piano. Blue Ridge Samba (2001) came to me as I was driving down the Blue Ridge Parkway on Thanksgiving Day, 2001, on my way to a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. It was an "I miss you" message to Deede, whom I had to leave behind. Though very short, it tells a complete story, with a bitter little twist at the end. Le Tango Eternel (1985) began as a duet and dance number for Winston Clark's off-Broadway show, Berlin in Light. The inspiration here is the passionate, sexy music of Astor Piazzola. The opening lines of Winston's lyrics suggest the emotional flavor: "You know that that's a lie / I didn't bite Yvette / I never wanted her / I only wanted you." Fern Honey (1972) subtitled "A Sentimental Rag," is the earliest of the “Silken Rags” pieces, written many years before I met Deede. It is an evocation of a romantic evening, its mood tempered by a note of farewell toward the end. Though originally written for violin and piano, it later became a part of "Clarinet Bouquet” a set of pieces for Jack Kreiselman, one of the founding faculty of Stony Brook’s music department. ~ programme notes compiled and/or written by Claudia Schaer

Prospectus: From Ethereal to Sonic, for Violin

Introduction How do we, as 21st-century musicians - composers, performers, interpreters - reunite a consistency of approach with the many differing styles of music facing us? To what extent is consistency possible, and to what extent is each piece - each phrase (?) - a new thing for us? Can a study of structure be helpful, or perhaps even suffice to guide our choices? If not, then what does? Can we fully articulate it? These questions have been in my mind for a very long time, and I am exceedingly grateful to Stony Brook for having enabled me to study them in more depth. The questions lie at the intersection of musical practice, and philosophy of music. The two go hand-in-hand: musical practice gives us music to speak about, and musical philosophy gives us clarity in how we speak about it, and with it, how we think and create new music. Musical practice is decision-making, philosophy examines why we make these decisions. This prospectus is accordingly in two parts: an exploration of the philosophical side of things, and then a brief description of the pieces chosen for the recital to which this prospectus belongs. As far as terminology is concerned (and terminology is closely linked to our concepts of ontology), there is not so much overlap between the two sections. I see this as being because the philosophical side is concerned with thought, possibility, and the roots of feeling, whereas the musical side is concerned with music, actuality, and the effects of feeling. The philosophical side helps us decide what we should talk about, and on the musical side, we talk about it. Clearly, one could not be without the other.

A Philosophical Investigation For about as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by the idea of systematizing music. I think a large part of my drive in this respect comes from having taken music lessons now since I was two and a half years old. That is a long time of being told - er, relying on others' opinions! Always keen to be an independent thinker, the idea of self-sufficiency (to some degree) appeals. If I could solve the problem of how to sound good myself, to figure out the system, I could not only pre-empt what my

instructors might say, but maybe even become one of those all-knowing creatures myself, which this Doctorate of Musical Arts degree surely is preparing me to be! After all, my parents are mathematicians, and in that field it is quite possible - is it its abstract quality? If so, how abstract is music? Additionally, I am a very instinctive player, and what if my instincts - or even my emotions should fail me? It would be nice to have a recourse. By systematizing, I mean both in terms of music as compositional language, and also in terms of how we shape it when we perform it. I am thinking of a creational/compositional element, as well as an interpretive/analytical/secondarily-creative element. 1 This wish, along with my music theory studies, led to my conceptualizing music as sonic structures, and seeking geometry in them. I wanted something that would go beyond Roman Numeral Analysis, or Pitch-Class Sets, or other genre-specific theories, to a form of analysis that could handle all music, and it seemed to me that if I could identify the "Library (set) of All Possible Sounds" and from it the subset "Library of All Possible Combinations of Sounds" along with a theory of their connectedness, that would pretty much cover it. My honours undergraduate thesis was about this, and was influenced by my studies in formal logic, which begins with atomic sentences and their connectors: it was essentially a view that set out to identify the atoms of music, how they could be put together, and how we could classify the relational elements among them. Though that paper failed to capture the pleasure of my committee, I still think there is merit in that, especially the relational bit. Nonetheless, I later decided to reverse my ontological order, going from larger-to-small rather than small-to-large, and to start with the "Library of All Possible Musical Shapes", then work backwards from there. I still prefer this version, since we get an entire Gestalt, see the big picture, and thereafter identify the smaller elements in it. We get a forest before we've counted 947½ trees. And the musical elements would be just part of a sequence. I especially like this version because it integrates Time. (On a related note, I've always felt something missing in Schenkerian analysis as it relates to performance, for while it's interesting to see the architecture in a full-frontal view, it tells us nothing whatever about how we get from one note to the next. We lose sight of what it means for something to happen after something else, and I feel a sense of stagnation in this view.) A time-experience is, I believe, a central element of our musical experience: imagine sounding an entire piece at once - we'd get stuck in a full-on one-chord harmonic mush. My revised view sees the idea or concept of the house coming before the bricks that are used to build it, and performance as travelling along that shape. Now, the questions occupying me are: what is the relation between music and sound-structures 1 (To my mind, composition is composing these zipping-about ethereal musical particles - formulating them on paper or in other physical form; constructing form from meaning. Interpretation is re-creating meaning from form.)

and is it complete, and does a Platonic (rather than a Nominalist) view of fully-complete (though infinite) hypothetical sound-structure libraries hold up. The concepts in question are best illustrated through a thought experiment concerning artificial intelligence. If we can actually view music as sound structures, figure out what the elements of those are, and figure out how to connect them, then we can hypothetically program a super-computer to generate the library of all possible sound-structures, and all the possible interpretations of them. Further, if we have a methodology for navigating sound-structures, then we can program the computer to play them well. In other words, if we know what algorithms we want, then we can just plug them in, and voilà, great music! Of course, the possibilities are of infinite number, which magnitude of infinite I have no idea. The link between mathematics and music is by now standard conversation-piece material, but the implication of the algorithmic view is that music is really just mathematics, in sonic form (and even the sonic part should be expressible in mathematical representations of waves). An endless play with numbers. Ok, I like that. Douglas Hofstadter's monumental book, Gödel Escher Bach, explores exactly such links. Yet even he, outstanding in his field of cognitive science, exploring and expanding the limits of artificial intelligence, distinguishes between what he calls human or "intelligent" mode, and systematic or "machine" mode, detailing the difference as being that humans want to know why.2 Aesthetics professor Lydia Goehr gave me a similar comment, when I spoke with her about sound structures: she said "But why these structures?" I am left with a question of correlation: can sound structures exist and operate just on their own, or do they need a connection to something outside of themselves? My intuition is that the reason we call normally call music "music", rather than "sound structure", is precisely because it bears a relation to something more than mathematical sound waves. At the risk of sounding banal (especially to committed hermeneuticists), there is a connection to a human element. While our infinite Libraries are in some sense conceivable, we choose their generating algorithms, or in less mathematical terms, their criteria, and in even more practical terms, we discover/create/choose the music in our current world, not to mention that which we call good (or at least debate over its aesthetic value) - we select it on some human basis. Even if the only criteria for choosing 50 000 among billions upon billions of possible sound structures is that life is short and that's all there's room for, that is still a human criteria. If indeed there is a connection to a human element, I return to my original question: can we systematize the human element in music? I'm going to venture my hunch, which is: no, we can't, not fully. My reasoning follows the central theme in Gödel Escher Bach, which is about being within or outside of a system, and what this means for the limits of perspective. The standard illustrative example 2 Gödel Escher Bach, 64.

is the liar's paradox, which shows that a sentence cannot say of itself that it is false. Similarly, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems show that a sentence in a formal system may be true but not provable. 3 In the same way, there are real-life practical statements that we just can't make about ourselves coherently: "I am lying", or "I am telling you a story" (which of course translates, in infinite regress, to "I am telling you that I'm telling you a story"). In a sense, the word "I" already is problematic, since by using it one is already speaking about oneself (in a sort of recursive way), rather than speaking simply as oneself (as objective-sounding statements such as "The sky is blue" imply, by not dividing the speaker into them and them-self) - but this is doubtless a huge subject that I'm not sure I have the courage to open here. Suffice to say that such problems exist, and if we are to extend to the systematization of music a human element, then we are creating a connection between musical structures and ourselves, and no longer have the all-knowing outsider's perspective. In other words, because our perspective is that of an insider, and therefore clouded, we're stuck with using all the language in our vocabulary and then some to get as close as possible to describing music. Words like "dolce" and "cantabile" may have mathematical definitions - I imagine parameters defining the amplitude and shape of the resultant sound waves, perhaps in relation to those around them - (just like "truth", of which I learned in metaphysics class that there are five main definition attempts, the most adept one of which appears to be Tarski's since it captures most what we'd like to say with the word) ... nonetheless, our feeling of (simply) sweetness, and mathematical-definition-of-sweetness, are two different things - formalization adds an extra element. Someone outside of ourselves could do the formalizing and show the correlation between us and music, but if we do it ourselves, we add a knot into the equation. Therefore, I posit that the more we structurally systematize, the more we can express about our conscious/external knowledge of musical specifics. This is a very useful endeavour. However, to return to my original project, it doesn't make me independent of my vast array of wonderful instructors, for they still have their individual perspectives to offer, indexical in expression: experiences, individual perceptions, different point-in-space-and-time - which are outside of my connection to music. Feelingbased words, then, are still up for grabs. How much up for grabs seems like a question in the realm of hermeneutics, and likely warrants a study connecting humanity (and its biological side?) and music. However, the philosophical question would remain: are connections between these fields necessary or contingent. For hypothetical example, just because every single person in existence might consider a two-note slurred downward gesture to mean "sigh", tells us nothing about whether a person who interprets it as "ridiculous laugh" might be born tomorrow. So, rather than affix in concrete musical 3 Hofstadter's book takes its title from the formal similarity in this respect between Gödel's Theorems, Escher's expectation-defying and as-self-referential-as-possible paintings, and Bach's musical ability to embody these concepts in the four-dimensional medium of pitches and rhythms.

gestures with meanings, as the resolute hermeneuticist would, it seems to me safer to take the Nominalist route, that similarities in human expression are a matter of convention, following Ludwig Wittgenstein's theory of how to define "What is a game" (via family resemblances) 4. A marking of "dolce", expressly indicating a human feeling, can change how I play an entire passage. 5 To define "dolce", then, we would need to catalogue all the experiences we wish to include under that heading; and in order to complete our complete list of musical elements, we would then also need to create an entire catalogue of human feeling and experience. That project, I take it, is ongoing every second of every day. Perhaps it is finite but if so I am oblivious to its finiteness, and according to our definitions of infiniteness, I don't think it is. Of course I think we can make some sense of the chaos - though feelings are always part of a specific story with a specific time and place; we feel similarities among them and group them under titles such as happiness, sadness, joy, anger, enlightenment, bemusement, and find them common to many people and situations. How else could we have empathy? This is again Wittgenstein's line. I feel that the answer to "How much should we systematize" is well-indicated in the title of Ivan Galamian's book on violin-playing: "Principles of Violin Playing and Teaching". A principle suggests an open concept, something that may be a guide, but without resorting to essentialism. What is inferrable from the notion of principle is to look at existing music, existing people and go from there. Some structural questions I've left open here are: would it be in fact desirable to find a coherent, non-contradictory language to describe all musical structures, and if so, how might this be achieved? I imagine it would have to be relationally-based, so that col legno battuto in Boulez's music makes sense in context, just as tonal harmonies do in the context, say, of Mozart's. A unified-theory solution entices because it allows us to answer why-questions structurally (i.e. we analyse a piece this way because of its structure, and that piece that way because of its structure, and the structural operators do not arbitrarily change); the alternative relies on non-structural answers to "Why one system here, and another there". Without a deeper structural theory, the answer to "Why Roman Numerals for tonal music, and Pitch Class sets for non-tonal" is simply circular: "That's how the composer created it" doesn't say why it works, it begs the question. Whether it's really hypothetically possible to discern such a deep structure in music (as Chomsky posits for syntax in natural language, or David Lewin aims for in Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations), and whether there are alternative ways for 4 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. 5 My late instructor and chamber music coach, Jacob Lateiner, had worked out a system for what one should do practically as a performer when happening upon markings such as "dolce" or "espressivo" in Beethoven. For example, espressivo was to be played slightly more slowly and richly than surrounding passages.

how to solve the problem is a mathematical question that I don't know the answer to. I believe it is an open question - ? I'll take recourse to avoid obligation to solve it here by saying that the answers are not as important to this philosophical prospectus as the questions themselves, again for the reason that even if we find a system that fits all music ever written or sung or played, and that lets us write and sing and play music the way we've always dreamt of, we still don't know the answer to whether it is the only system possible. Nonetheless, the answer as to whether there is a deep structure discernible in music would finally tell us the degree to which the old cliché is true, that "music is a universal language". (And as I listen to the birds outside my window, and think perhaps I could understand what they are singing about, I'd like to think it could be true!) To return to my thesis here, however, I conclude that the Library of All Possible Sound Structures differs from that of the Library of All Possible Music, which is a cousin of the Library of All Possible Musical Experiences. The modality of possibility carries with it a Platonic flavour, and we mere mortals are not privy to the full Platonic heavens - so, I'll always be able to learn something from people who aren't me. Nonetheless, I still hope to graduate! And to continue honing both my instincts and intellect, interacting all the while. The questions might be constantly reframed, but I think good structural delineation is still possible ... and, the nice thing is, others might be able to learn something from me!

Relating Philosophy and Music, Practically The opposition between systematization and the feeling of freedom-from-systematization is historically central to the arts, as well as to our conception of what art is. The father of electronic music, Edgard Varèse (on whose piece Hyperprism I wrote my DMA essay), spoke of the opposition between analysis and composition, and that when composing one must never analyse. (His wife Louise writes of his life-long quest for the feeling of freedom, this freedom being a major part of what he loved about his American life, which represented a break with tradition and rules of the past.) Analogously, philosophers since Nietzsche speak of the harmonious Apollonian and the driving Dionysian, and also the divide between the Analytic and Continental traditions of philosophy. In a structural mindset, I might describe this difference as the opposition between being or operating - within a system, and breaking free to the not-yet-systematizeable. Debussy also spoke of this difference: "Pieces make rules, never rules pieces". Dan Weymouth and Peter Winkler, whose pieces I am playing on my final recital, and whom I interviewed for this prospectus, spoke about these differences as well. Dan phrased it as the distinction between right-brain and left-brain, elaborating that composers who work with computers often like the problem-solving element that working with preprogrammed media allows, which is a different skill than deciding how a piece should go. Peter spoke of working in the predominantly 12-tone environment of Princeton in the 60's, and the feeling of liberation that came with gravitating to popular music and specifically rags, of the richness of tunewriting, and of working with scales, but sometimes breaking free from them into free atonality or through the use of quarter tones. Varèse too had a strong craving for freedom, according to his wife Louise in A Looking-glass Diary. She writes of his exuberance at feeling it in the New York noisescapes, and subsequently incorporating their sounds (most noticeably the siren), in his music. Mathematically, it's the difference between calculating out an algorithm, and coming up with a top-ofthe-chain algorithm. If I am not writing structurally, perhaps I could say it is the difference between a stability and a predictability we crave - to know that tomorrow will exist - to rest for a moment, and the excitement of something new, of a joke we never thought of, of being shaken out of our normal groove if we like it and rut if we don't. Personally I like a balance - perhaps it's simply that the yin-yang thing works for me, or perhaps there is a golden mean of human experience, and the degree of isomorphism to this magic ratio that tells us whether we consider a piece of music is good ... I will now decide that this is far beyond the scope of this prospectus, except to say that whether we're matrix-like stuck in the numbers, or whether we generate the forms, the problems of self-reference and recursiveness would still let us only approximate the answer.

The Programme of April 29, 2011. Not the Royal Wedding. The other Event. Let me get now then to the pieces (with just a bit more about structure in general). Repertoire. There are several reasons why I chose this repertoire. For one, I felt that if I played our home team composers' music, I might more easily be able to gather an audience for my recital ... and music is better shared! For another, I've been interested in composition for about as long as I can remember, and what better way to explore it further than by interacting with real live composers, and also writing something myself. As a kid, I acquired a bad case of "composers-block", which began when I realized that the things I was doodling on the piano didn't sound like the composers I was playing, namely Mozart, Beethoven and Bach; I figured I must not be doing it the right way. (Despite taking all the counterpoint, harmony, orchestration, analysis, and even composition courses I could offered by my previous two degrees, I'd still only but amassed a grand total of maybe 10 pages of freestyle writing.) So, a deadline by which to finish a piece, and the kind supportiveness and direction of Peter Winkler, seemed like the perfect combination to finally dip my toes a bit more committedly into a land of rulelessness. Additionally, playing pieces by composers whom I could talk to about their processes would flesh out my questions about "the compositional process", as tends to be the philosophical abstract-seeming frame of it, or whether things vary from person to person, and if so, how each person tackles the art of writing something on a blank page (or Sibelius screen, as the case may be). Somehow we group the activities of different composers under the same heading: composition. What's the wiggle room? Another criteria in my choice of repertoire is that I'm interested in a wide variety of genres, and intrigued by the questions I elucidated in the philosophical section above, of whether I can interpret many different styles using the same systematic interpretive apparatus. I'll be playing pieces ranging from a solo violin tonal elegy to music with interactive computer to rags, so this seems like a pretty good test! Even if I can't in the end show that I used one system for all, at the least I can say that I didn't (hopefully!) split into several people by playing such a diverse programme, so at least there's some unity there (and the question to solve then winds up being the continuity-through-time problem). Structural Interpretation Therefore, I feel it is salient to sketch for you my structural interpretive system. If I had any computer-skills, I imagine that much of what I'll write here could be programmed. Of course, as a performer, there are things that I haven't thought about that I do intuitively (for example, exactly how

much I might bend a rhythm to show a counterpoint), and since my intuition includes my genetics and my entire life experience, that could be a bit difficult to programme. I don't think I'm biased, though I'll admit that I'm not willing to agree that farming out my possibilities for playing jobs to computers would result in anywhere near the same quality just yet! I also wish to be very clear that my position is not that performers should play heartlessly, purely intellectually, or machine-like, not by any means. I simply wish to investigate how far we rely on structure as a guide, as a way to solidify and enrich our understanding of music and with it, writing and playing. I think my structural approach is very simple, and relativistic. In a nutshell: I bring out changes in pattern. Pitches can go up, down or stay the same, and I believe we expect them to continue as they began. So I bring out changes in pattern via dynamics, tempo, and articulation. The same goes for rhythm - tempo can stay the same, or speed up or slow down; again I believe we expect a linearity, so changes in linearity are useful tools. Of course we can play with hierarchies of the pattern to keep the beats moving at a constant rate, but to play with the notes in-between, or to let the notes inbetween be more important and dictate where the beats will be. Articulation, percussive sounds, and sound colour are more subjective, but again I feel that we most notice sounds as they relate to other sounds we hear - that the question "how alike" sets up the palette. That's it. Oh - and as far as pitches are concerned, we respond to harmony by how consonant or dissonant, and I feel this is dictated by the physics of the overtone series - it gives us the mathematical complexity or simplicity of the relations between sine waves. In this view, the relation of a piece to itself - the interrelatedness of its elements, influences a great deal of my decisions. Nonetheless, the question why still raises its head - why do I feel that Bach should be played faster than the 20th-century tradition? It's not that I studied Historical Performance Practice, and gathered it from there - it's that I feel the structure of the piece faster. I felt supported in this view only after I had formulated it, when I tried out a Baroque violin with gut strings for the first time, and felt that the instrument does not lend itself to highlighting the sustaining of sound, but rather to letting the sound live and die quickly, moving on. Perhaps it just so happens that Bach's music is worked out in so much detail that the form demands the faster tempo, which happens to be in line with the instruments of the time. The problem I'm leaving open, of course, is what specifically I am relating - should an entity of music be a pitch, a rhythm - a note? Should we be thinking of music in terms of notes? I think this is where suddenly my very simple system gets extremely complex (and why it is very difficult if not impossible to spell the system out clearly enough to programme a computer to do what humans

naturally do) - our notion of what constitutes a Gestalt, if you will, is vague, open-ended, and variable 6. Hence the terminology we are accustomed to in music analysis, such as 'phrase', 'motive', and 'theme', often winds up being more practical than overly-specific parameters such as '440Hz, for a duration of 589 milliseconds' (except perhaps in musique concrète). I suppose the "meaning" part of this picture becomes alive in the choices (whether conscious or not) I make regarding how I bring out changes in pattern - what does it mean for a pitch pattern to change from upward scalar to large leap downward? I think my thought-process winds up being something along the lines of, "If I were singing this musical line, and I followed that shape, what would I be feeling?" and then I colour it in in some way that matches isomorphically in my mind. Of course that is begging-the-philosophical-question, since if I already have an intuition about what I feel, then I don't need the structural business anymore. I'm sure I relate it to my feelings and experiences somehow - but that is a different thing from suggesting that structure can stand alone, either without questions of meaning, or to have meaning in-and-of-itself. Perhaps, in puritan terms, such self-standing structure is the domain only of abstract music. To ascribe to that view is then to say that some music is abstract and some isn't, and would go against the premise of all music being nothing but sound structures, which was the initial question of this prospectus. Put a different way, I can explain many things in structural sonic terms, but not, for example, why my Brahms sounds better when I simply think of the Danube. Perhaps when I think of the Danube it makes my Brahms-structure more Danube-like, and maybe that suits it better and helps it jump into the classification of structures that we consider "better"; however, while structure alone can be isomorphic to experience, it cannot get outside of itself to tell me about the experience. What I mean to say, I think, is that structure doesn't generate itself, and if music is in some way to answer the question why, then we need to get to what generated it. If Brahms was inspired by the Danube, then maybe just getting back to Brahms's mindset, and to the Danube, can be more helpful in playing his music in a "better" or perhaps "more artistic" way than seeking out the magic structural ingredient that so happens to be Danube-like. On the other hand, just thinking about the Danube and not knowing anything about the structure might work for some people, but more often than not leaves details washed up on the riverbank. The human and the structural elements are, I think, closely intertwined. Since this paper is concentrating mostly on the structural side, suffice to say that a balance is necessary. Do musical entities in fact function only on a level of interrelatedness amongst themselves, or is there a relation to external factors? In Xenakis' music, as Dan Weymouth pointed out to me, 6 Dan Weymouth told me projects to program a computer to recognize an apple in all possible views - which is still unsolved. Philosophers face the same problem with things such as, for classic example, tables and chairs.

mathematical processes determine the music; listening to its narrative structure, we may miss the point. Still, on the flip side, perhaps we're interested in the sonic realizations of those mathematical processes exactly because of interrelatedness of their internal elements. Nonetheless, relying on relating internal elements exclusively, presupposes what Lydia Goehr terms the "work-concept" in music: it has a beginning and an end, and no matter how precisely a work, say Beethoven's 5th, begins in a performance, it is affected by how it ends. Is there room in the theory for improvisation, or for the passer-by who heard only the exposition? (Nelson Goodman says no.) It is the antithesis of hermeneutics, in which the opening motive is, say, a fist-shaking in all circumstances. Perry Goldstein's piece, Arrested Lighting, is an excellent exemplar on which to ponder this. The piece is based on paintings by Paul Klee. As Perry explained, "the paintings drive the material of the piece", but the music is about "making satisfying music [...] the choices of the paintings and of movement materials and interrelationships are made to hang together in a satisfying way, to make structural and material sense". I will write more about each individual work on the program later. In practice, I think a balanced approach works best. However, there is one little thing still favouring a structural emphasis. Every artist knows that being self-conscious is a death-knell to one's art. Even thinking "I will think about the abstract music only", already contains that dangerous word "I", (....and these thoughts have undoubtedly cost me a few orchestral auditions, which, if I may rant frankly for a moment, are environments specifically created to judge the artist, and so require some even more concentrated mental gymnastics to think about, ahem, music, or anything but one's own performance). If the emotions I am expressing are to sound like an extension of myself, then during performance, if I become conscious of the name of an emotion/impression/feeling I am expressing, I find myself again in the self-referential predicament of doing two different things at once: identifying the emotion, and expressing it. This is also problematic because the act of identifying it places a temporal boundary around it, since we can only identify after-the-fact (what would we be referring to, otherwise?) However, a structural view only has this problem if we view structure statically, and we can choose not to view it statically. So I prefer to form an opinion as to a piece's extra-structural elements (such as emotion) long prior to performance, and then let these intuitions and impressions influence me only on the subconscious level in performance; to experience and express without identifying. Somehow, this seems to make it easier to link the emotion/meaning a piece wishes to express (presumably, the why that influenced the composer to write that piece), with my emotional state at the time. No knots in-between.

The Pieces A note about terminology: if we were pure structuralists, we wouldn't feel it necessary to mention anything about the history of the pieces, nor the feeling they seek express. Vice versa if we felt the structure were irrelevant to the feeling being expressed. I'm taking a middle-of-the-road approach here. Perry Goldstein's Arrested Lightning is based on ten paintings by Paul Klee. They take their inspiration from the paintings themselves, driven by the "movement" the paintings suggest. I am excited to be playing them with the paintings present, as I'm sure this will add to the experience - and create a whole new discussion about structure, since we will have more-than-sonic elements involved! Perry writes that while he tailored the pieces to the paintings in length as well as in content (keeping in mind how long he wished each painting to be viewed), the interrelationships within the music needed to be musically satisfying; the music can stand on its own. The piece was written this past year for the trio of a former Stony Brook clarinet student Richard Faria. The movements are divided by the order of the paintings into a group of four "performers", which are similar to one another in their atonal language and frenetic gestures, four "portraits", which are based on the 17th-century modal melody of Thomas Tallis's O Nata Lux, which is entirely contrasting from the other material. Finally, there is a "landscape", which is similar to the "performers" (since the painting is titled Yellow Birds and suggests a great din of ), and the "Ghost of a Genius" movement, which is to be a contrast from the rest, a bit of comic relief. Daria Semegen's Music for Violin Alone (1981) was originally conceived as a virtuosic violinpiano duo, but after experimenting Daria felt that the music would be more concentrated and powerful for just one instrument. She re-wrote some of the piano gestures into the violin part, and threw out the remainder of the piano part, with the motto "less is more". The piece is carefully notated, and full of complex musical gestures, expressions, contrasts, articulations, and registral curves. It is a dissonant, atonal serial piece based on an 11-note row, and centered around the note D. The end is the retrograde of the opening. The freedom left to the performer is mainly rhythmic: "flexibility with tempo and rubato as fits the flow of the performance". Daria writes, "The musical expression is more important than constant precise execution as the goal." The piece is conceived as dramatic in nature, and the performer needs to let the contrasts and tension-resolutions show; the challenge is for the 'shattered sounds' to make sense in a delivery that is to come across with expressivity and even lyricism. As a

performer, one of the techniques I can use to achieve this expressivity is retaining a sense of continuity of how the gestures relate to one another, and being in tune with the larger rhythmical timing; to let the fragments appear as fragments, but also as part of a larger structure. Claudia Schaer's Bagatelles for String Trio (or, Variations on Cage's 4'33") was completed in the nick of time to be included on this programme. I have long wished to write, but have been shy - to commit to writing them for this recital, and to come to composition lessons, has let me commit to writing on paper what's in my head. The idea of writing for string trio came from Peter Winkler's suggestion to explore harmonically, and the form of the bagatelle - brief - lets me encapsulate exactly one thought - no self-reference, no looking-back, no doubt - a continuity from beginning to end. The bagatelles are very different one from the other, and my only rule was to have no rules, so they range from free atonality to some-what-tonal to overtone-based, in meter or without meter. I hope you enjoy them! Béla Bartók's Sonata for Solo Violin was written in 1943-44 on commission for Yehudi Menuhin, while Bartók was undergoing treatment for the leukemia to which he would succumb the following year. The Sonata is in four movements: 1.Tempo di ciaccona, 2.Fuga (risoluto, non troppo vivo), 3.Melodia (Adagio), and 4.Presto. The first movement mixes the ciaccona rhythm (3/4, with an emphasis on the second beat) with the Hungarian rhythms emphasizing the beginnings of beats. The theme, stated in the beginning, returns three times, delineating the sections. There are two other main groups of material, and these are treated almost episodically, and with variation as the movement progresses. The Fuga is in three voices, and is in strictly traditional fugal form. The opening motive, an ascending minor third on C and Eb, creates the center around which the other pitches of the theme revolve. (Boulez would later call such notes "polar notes".) As in much of Bartók's later music, he incorporates 12-tone-technique in his own particular flavour - for example, the scales in first episode are 12-tone, but the technique is used to center around notes (B, in the first scale), and create, as in tonal language, harmonic stresses and unstresses amongst the notes, even a sense of modulation. The third movement, Melodia, is, as its title suggests, a lyrical melody, which is eventually played through all the registers of the instrument. It uses Bartók's "night music" effects - quick modal scales (some octatonic), trills, and haunting night-bird-like sounds (achieved by harmonics). Bartók wrote the last movement, Presto, with quarter-tones, but provided an ossia since he was concerned about the playability of the piece, and quarter-tones were not nearly as common a part of a violinist's bag-oftricks in 1944 as now. The movement alternates sections of night-music - muted, quick, tremolo-like -

with exuberant dance-like sections in the dorian mode. A 'tranquillo' theme also makes an appearance, twice, harkening back to a fragment of the melody of the 3rd movement. The piece ends joyously, with a rising scale leading to a fortissimo G major chord. Even though Bartók was not at Stony Brook, I really wanted to include this piece on the program as Bartók was my earliest connection to "contemporary" music - or perhaps I should say 'nontonal' music - and since this piece is one of the cornerstones of the modern-day violin repertoire. With it, Bartók utilized many non-traditional techniques of violin-playing, and expanded what was conceived as possible for the instrument. In my mind, it is also an epitome of the melding of form and expression. The form speaks for itself - and there is so much more we can express with this form. Intermission - the most essential part of a concert, judging statistically by its frequency of occurrence. Dan Weymouth's This Time, This was written for Stony Brook student Todd Reynolds in 1991 (the same year Boulez wrote the first version of Anthèmes, which would later have responsive electronics added). It is a kind of chamber music, using state-of-the-art interactive electronics: the MIDI program MAX. The performer acts as catalyst and conductor: the sounds of the violin are converted into MIDI numbers by the computer, and the programs written by the composer then act upon the information entered, responding with both human and computer-generated sounds. The violinist thus determines pitch content, dynamics, and rhythmic placement of the musical events, which are in many cases left partially aleatoric by the composer. The piece was strongly conceived with the sound and capabilities of the electronics in mind, and it is my job as a performer to find a most interesting path through the clouds of possibilities, although according to what's written, any path is acceptable. In a sense, this piece is the most-structural/least-emotive one on my recital, for it is about sound and form and intriguing patterns and not explicitly notated as about more than that. Nonetheless, by coupling a live performer with a responsive but pre-programmed machine, it is also a commentary on the role of composer and performer, and a dialogue between spur-of-the-moment feeling and given parameters. Any such interaction likely suggests the question, "To what extent are we machines, and to what extent are computers human?" Fortunately the audience is also human, so we get to have this discussion on human terms. It was also interesting to me that, in the first rehearsal, I could play the structure in many different ways, but only once I had the words "frantic, hectic, like there isn't time to put an end on the notes", did I really know what Dan intended to communicate. In reverse, though, I think a recording of me playing it in a rushed way will indeed be recognizable as frenzy.

Sheila Silver's Six Beads on a String was written in memory of her father-in-law, Charles Feldman. It begins with a simple Aeolian melody in A, and develops into variations that end in a passacaglia. The title, as well as the chaconne-like repetition, suggests a feeling of tenderness mixed with grief. The solo violin setting, as well as the self-referential element of the variations, present even within the theme itself, suggest a very personal elegy. The piece makes use of the range of the instrument, in particular of the violin's ability to keep a ground bass going via arpeggiation. Peter Winkler's Silken Rags strike me as the least structural pieces on the programme. What I mean by this is that I need to fill in the most amount of information - if I play only what's on the page I completely miss the point. Based on my intuition, and on having heard rags and tangos and sambas before, as well as being advised by Peter's vast knowledge of the genres, I bend the rhythm, add slides, and so forth. What surprised me, as I was deciding on some fingerings, is how strongly I feel about the various decisions I make, as much as I like to think that there are many interpretations to everything. For example, there is one phrase in which I've decided on two slides and a third upward bend of pitch, and I'm convinced that anything more would be excess and anything less not enough. I suspect that, despite what appears to be a pretty free and simple form, the brilliancy of the pieces lies in their ability to really pinpoint a feeling, and that I'm responding to what strikes me as part of that feeling and what doesn't. How do they pinpoint that feeling? I think Peter has found phrases that are really unique ... we recognize the logic and the patterns and the tango rag and samba motives, but somewhere in there is a bend that we've never thought of and that seems like it couldn't happen anywhere else. Like a prime number among the composites. Or, if you prefer, a meadow's first flower of spring. The elements are the usual suspects: rhythm, line, harmony, and the magic's in the combination. A great example is the main motive in Fern Honey, in which the melody leaps upward by a fifth, then eventually falls back down to the C we were expecting given the A and Bb before the F - it's a beautiful gesture that is easily recognizable as a momentary departure to a foreign land and return. The piece was written for a former Stony Brook violin student whose name was Fern Honey - if she's anything like the piece I think I'd like to meet her someday!

Selected Bibliography Philosophical and theoretical texts Danto, Arthur. 'Depiction and Description', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol.43 No.1 (Sept.1982), 1-19 Gallie, W.B. 'Art as an Essentially Contested Concept', The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol.6 No.23 (April 1956), 97-114. Goehr, Lydia. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Kennick, William E. 'Does Traditional Aesthetics Rest on a Mistake?', Mind, 67 (1958), 317-334 Kivy, Peter. 'Platonism in Music: A Kind of Defense", Grazer Philosophische Studien, 19 (1983), 109-130 Lewin, David. Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987. Meyer, Leonard B. Emotion and Meaning in Music. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1956. Weitz, Morris. 'The Role of Theory in Aesthetics', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 15 (1956), 27-35 Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations, tr. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford, 1958. Ziff, Paul; Sircello, Guy; Walton, Kendall L. 'The Cow on the Roof', and replies, in 'The Aesthetics of Music', Journal of Philosophy, 70 (1973), 713-26

Musical and historical texts Bartók, Béla.

Hungarian Folk Music, tr M.D. Calvocoressi. Oxford University Press, 1931. Sonata for Solo Violin. London, New York, Bonn, Sydney, Tokyo, Toronto: Boosey and Hawkes,

1994. (With a foreword by Peter Bartók, and letters from Bartók to Menuhin about the Sonata.)

Galamian, Ivan. Principles of Violin Playing and Teaching. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1985 and 1962. Gollin, Edward. 'Multi-Aggregate Cycles and Multi-Aggregate Serial Techniques in the Music of Béla Bartók', Music Theory Spectrum, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Spring 2010) pp. 60-78. Varèse, Louise. A Looking-Glass Diary, Vol.1. New York: Norton, 1972. Personal Interviews and Correspondence with Goldstein, Perry Semegen, Daria Silver, Sheila Weymouth, Daniel Winkler, Peter

Appendix: Analytical sketches - lecture notes on the pieces

Arrested Lightning: Ten Klee Impressions

Perry Goldstein, 2010

I. Der Seilänzer The Tightrope Walker II. Engel, noch weiblich Angel, still feminine III. Gebannter Blitz Arrested Lightning IV. Ein Genius serviert ein kleines Frühstück. Engel bringt das Gewünschte A spirit serves a small breakfast. Angel brings the Desired V. Gespenst eines Genies Ghost of a Genius VI. Zauber Kunst Stück Conjuring Trick VII. Alter Klang Ancient Sound VIII. Akrobats Acrobats IX. Landschaft mit Gelben Vögeln Landscape with Yellow Birds X. Angelus Novus New Angel

Performer paintings (with movement): I, III, VI, VIII - and IX. is similar: riotous . Free atonality: eg. the opening two measures, which re-appears throughout, is whole-tone. Rhythmic jaggedness, and sharp contrasts in activity. Yellow Birds, however, is in 16ths, whereas the other movements have sextuplets, and after the initial statement flows from beginning to end. The evenness of these figures lends a feeling of smoothness that is broken by the accented and pizzicato notes and off-beat rhythms (and hopefully not by any mishaps from the performers, wish us luck!) Portrait paintings (still, Angels): II, IV, X - from another worlds (literally): All feature Thomas Tallis's O Nata Lux melody: b-c-a-b, f#-g-e-f# - in different settings. Contrast to others achieved with slow pace & slow harmonic rhythm, sparser harmonies, tessitura/high register, quiet dynamics. Each note/harmony has time to ring quietly on its own. V. Ghost of a Genius - Meant as comic relief, "sad sack" - material has very little to do with the others. "Mumbling". Still free atonality. Rhythm is rounded out by polyrhythmic figures (2 against 3). - How does having the paintings present alter the outcome? The music would work on its own, just as ballet and opera music can work on its own, but since the pieces are programmatic, it certainly adds an extra element and enhances the message coming across by giving it to sight as well as sound.

About the genesis of the piece, in Perry's words: For some years, I've wanted to write a piece for Richard Faria, who was a DMA student in clarinet at Stony Brook in the mid-90's and my teaching assistant. We've become friends over the years. He's on the faculty at Ithaca College. My pieces are often inspired by the group or person for whom they are written. Rick has a keen sense of humor and a goodnatured sense of the absurd. Though I seem to be far more inspired by sound than by visual cues, I've always been

attracted to Paul Klee's paintings, so much so that the only other time a work of art served as inspiration for a piece was in 1997 when I composed "Twittering Machine" (on a Paul Klee painting) for the Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players. Why Klee? I think I'm drawn to his works because they often can be simultaneously playful and subtly sinister, danger lurking behind a cartoon. In addition, many of the paintings suggest physical movement, and capturing that movement in music posed interesting challenges. After looking at hundreds of paintings, I also realized that the variety of paintings--some "action-packed" and others more still, even ethereal--would supply the range of expression needed to create the right contrast and drama for a set of short pieces. Finally, the idea of writing miniatures, which I have never done,appealed to me. These pieces range from about 20 seconds to a minute and 45 seconds. My music tends to be expansive, so I liked the challenge of limiting each piece to an idea or two. In a miniature, as in a short story (as opposed to a novel), there is little room for development; the "meat" of the movement has to be gotten to quickly, and there needs to be something that is arrestingly engaging: pithy, momentarily beautiful, breathless, splashy, etc. These challenges were provocative and engaged me in the writing of the piece.

Music for Violin Solo

Daria Semegen, 1973

The

violinist on the rec. is Carol Sadowski who was a MMus student at SBU. The recording session was in aManhattan church. btw the recording was made in phrases, fragments rather than all the way through as "one performance". then the recording tape was edited to achieve continuity in going from one section or fragment to another. The violinist was coached by Joyce Robbins, her teacher. The title is Music for Violin Solo ("violin alone"). I lived in Manhattan and was at Columbia Univ. There were no performers in the music dept (!!), That was news to me, that a mus. dept. would have no performers. stupid? ridiculous? both. I wanted to write a highly expressive, gymnastical virtuoso violin & piano piece. I wanted to work on it with a violinist who plays contemporary music or at least tries to. Genette Foster,a violinist studying musicology at NYU, was recommended to me. We'd meet when i'd written something more and try it out for sound and performance possibility. After a while I decided that a duo won't work well for me and that "less is more". I put some of the piano gestures into the solo violin part and threw out the piano completely. As a solo work, the music made more sense to me as it was not diluted between 2 instruments. It became a more intense and flashier "virtuoso" piece. It sounded more concentrated musically than it did with the piano involved. The violin plays many quick, complex musical gestures, expressions, contrasts. many phrases and registral curves, articulations. It rarely sits still. There's on ongoing variety of articulations, micro-variations of sounds and dynamic changes. I often visualized how this would look in performance. That fantasy was an inspiration for many gestures in the piece. I thought only of the musical aspects, expressions, and not the technical difficulties of performing them. The violinist I worked with would react to these, advise with practical suggestions. I wanted a relatively smooth performance and not something impossible to put together. The piece is based on a 11-tone and it's a serial piece. D is a significant pitch. It starts and ends the piece and is variously prolonged and elaborated The last few pitches of the piece are a retrograde of the beginning of the piece. It is dissonant atonal music. I feel that a player can take flexibilities with this solo piece and occasionally vary tempos, parts of rhythmic patternsto serve their interpretation/expression in the flow of their performance. The musical expression is more important than constant precise execution as the goal. Dissonant clusters are part of the language, registral "contortions" from low to high, etc., fast moves, a sense of fractured lines. Within the jaggedness there is lyricism that can be found and brought out. It's a dramatic piece, meaning there are contrasts and tension-resolutions. Perhaps the challenge of it is to have all the "shattered sounds" make sense in a delivery that strives for expressivity and even lyricism. My score design won aGeorge Peabody publishing award. It was published without binding as loose sheets in a folder, quite unusual for the time. The work won the Int'l Society for Contemporary Music Chamber Music Works Competition and represented the USA in performances in Helsinki and Stockholm. Later it was recorded by Carol Sadowski onNew World Recordsas an LP. If you have more questions, please write me. cheerio & good luck with it! Daria

Bagatelles for String Trio

Claudia Schaer, 2011

(notes: different styles of music - surely a composer doesn't restrict him or herself, except in the context of an exercise or experiment? is it an after-the-fact thing? family resemblances ... )

Sonata for Solo Violin

I. Tempo di Ciaccona II. Fuga III. Melodia IV. Presto

Béla Bartók, 1944

- Heard Menuhin play Bach C+ the year before - many structural similarities - Hungarian treatment of traditional form - Ciaccona with stress on first or second beats? - Hungarian peasant tunes: parlando-rubato style vs. tempo giusto style (dance); meticulous study of these. From them: pentatonicity (fourth chords as a result), modes, quarter (and smaller-than-quarter)-tones (third tones) - use of 11-note-rows ? Béla Bartók's Sonata for Solo Violin was written in 1943-44 on commission for Yehudi Menuhin, while Bartók was undergoing treatment for the leukemia to which he would succumb the following year. The Sonata is in four movements: 1.Tempo di ciaccona, 2.Fuga (risoluto, non troppo vivo), 3.Melodia (Adagio), and 4.Presto. The first movement mixes the ciaccona rhythm (3/4, with an emphasis on the second beat) with the Hungarian rhythms emphasizing the beginnings of beats. The theme, stated in the beginning, returns three times, delineating the sections. There are two other main groups of material, and these are treated almost episodically, and with variation as the movement progresses. The Fuga is in three voices, and is in strictly traditional fugal form. The opening motive, and ascending minor third on C and Eb, creates the center around which the other pitches of the theme revolve. (Boulez would later call such notes "polar notes".) As in much of Bartók's later music, he incorporates 12-tone-technique in his own particular flavour - for example, the scales in first episode are 12-tone, but the technique is used to center around notes (B, in the first scale), and create, as in tonal language, harmonic stresses and unstresses amongst the notes, even a sense of modulation. The third movement, Melodia, is as its title suggests, a lyrical melody, which is eventually played through all ranges of the instrument. It uses Bartók's "night music" effects - quick modal scales (some octatonic), trills, and haunting night-bird-like sounds (achieved by harmonics). Bartók wrote the last movement, Presto, with quarter-tones, but provided with an ossia since he was concerned about the playability of the piece, and quarter-tones were not nearly as common a part of a violinist's bag-of-tricks in 1944 as now. The movement alternates sections of night-music - muted, quick, tremolo-like - with exuberant dance-like sections in the dorian mode. A 'tranquillo' theme also makes an appearance, twice, harkening back to a fragment of the melody of the 3rd movement. The piece ends joyously, with a rising scale leading to a fortissimo G major chord. Even though Bartók was not at Stony Brook, I really wanted to include this piece on the program as Bartók was my earliest connection to "contemporary" music - or perhaps I should say 'non-tonal' music - and since this piece is one of the cornerstones of the modern-day violin repertoire. With it, Bartók utilized many non-traditional techniques of violin-playing, and expanded what was conceived as possible for the instrument. In my mind, it is also an epitome of the melding of form and expression. The form speaks for itself - and there is so more we can express with this form.

This time, this

Daniel Allen Weymouth, 1991

- title reflects reaction to "too-tightly-scripted" so-called interactive electronic music - this piece leaves freedom for the performer, and the electronics respond to what the performer does, which is new technology (and departure from electronics that had to be fully pre-programmed and amounted to the instrumentalist performing together with a recording; eg. Davidovsky Synchronisms for Tape & Violin (1988).) - written for Todd Reynolds, 1991. (while Todd TA at SB) - the feel (rhythmic drive) is frenetic - to pack as much into ever moment as possible - no time to put an ending on - opening motive (unusual technique for Dan): (4 notes) gives fourths, (descending/displaced) half-steps, and also diminished fourth (third): used throughout the piece in variations. (raises question - how do we understand this: is it universal? contrast between rising and descending) - variations, and computer effects increase the sonic information directed at us Form: A) Opening Section, cadenza-like, presents the main material, with violin solo B) electronics come in. Gate 2: tremolo effect . ..... C) solo violin D) boxes. the pitch material has developed into four distinct pools of material Gate 1: like 2 but pitches fan out E) solo violin gives impetus, immediately electronics come in. Interruptions. Motive reappears. Gate 5 bends pitch F)- H) variations I) glisses - upside-down of what Gate 5 does, but faster. J) - indeterminate pitches K) Solo Violin brings the register back down L) opening motive with electronics - closing gesture - interactive nature of the violin and electronics: ... originally written for a ZETA violin, which has a pick-up on each string, so that the electronics can respond to each separately. Re-written for a regular instrument (when Todd Reynold's Zeta was stolen) (?) MAX program for MIDI - Miller Pucket @ IRCAM, David Zicarelli - similar program "Cycling 74" MIDI - Musical Instrument Digital Interface, developed 1980's - designed so synthesizers could 'communicate' (have common language?)- binary encoding. It's OOP - Object-Oriented Program: recognizes types of sound/pitches (philosophically put, it's the task of defining what the object in question is, in this case it's done by wave-form?) 1993/94 ANOTHER VIOLIN - development in technology (Yamaha synthesizer TG33) more programming/voicing possibilities: 16 voices; pre-recorded waveforms get manipulated (no presets) - later SYSEX has 100+ voices Studied and worked at leading Computer-Music facilities, including Stanford's CCRMA, Pierre Boulez's IRCAM and Iannis Xenakis' CEMAMu (both in Paris). (Boulez: Répons 1981-84, Anthèmes II 1997; Davidovsky Synchronisms begin 1960's) Relevant-to-here Philosophical implications: AI - can produce music in the style of Mozart on a bad day: finite # of variables (though huge!) We can infer, machine can't; We ask why, machine no. Self-awareness - we have it, machines no: it's the "meta"-problem (getting outside of the system one is in - which, my argument here is, is exactly what art does

Six Beads on a String, for solo violin

Sheila Silver, 2008

- dedicated to the memory of her father-in-law, Charles Feldman - premiered by Yevgeny Kutik in Washington DC, 2008 - based on simple aeolian theme in A, m.1-16, with characteristics of ending on A at m. 4, 8, and 16, and going to the "dominant" only at 12. So, period-form, but not quite. Gives more emphasis on the A, and already within the 16 bars creates feeling of referring to the first four measures, and with it, of the first for measures being the theme proper, due to some parts of the later phrases being variations on the former. - 6 following sections: 1)2) very similar - use of open strings and adding pulsation to the rhythm of the melody, in duples or triples. uses violin-tailored arpeggios 3) adds a counter-theme which is the inversion of the theme, on the most distant pitch (Eb). Effect is of odd atonality entering - a disturbance in what was already there. Pitch content explores the half-steps around the Aeolian A - Bb, C#, Eb, F#, G# - either as clashing or later as resolving, and finally unfolding into a sort of A 13, leading to 4) the theme in D, contrastingly dancelike to the melodious part before. Bb's appear, giving it a decidedly minor feel. Later, Ab's appear also, centering around A. The section ends with harmonics on the D string, leading to ... 5) free section, based on B-Bb-Ab- A bringing us back to A, via D 6) chords use theme fragments - passacaglia-like section is free variation and fragmentation of the theme

Silken Rags

Peter Winkler, ~ Blue Ridge Samba ~ Le Tango Eternel ~ Fern Honey

2001

1985 (arranged 1995) 1972

A departure from the serial music of Princeton in the 60's. Peter was a fan of the Beatles, and decided that the route of "good tunes" - not as easy as it sounds - was more for him. Blue Ridge Samba - story: sad little tale, hopeful in the middle, farewell wave on a journey - samba rhythm - violin gradually alters harmony, flavour, of backgournd harmony: sounds as in G+ but begins on E-7. Goes to G when hopeful for happy ending - ends in G- for bitter twist - form: 2 parts - 1) E- goes to G+(26), 2) 35-end E- almost goes to G+, but ends in GTango - two lovers, entwined in their love-hate eternal tango ... - inspired by Piazzolla tango rhythm: three main (m. 7, 31, 55). (2nd is Habanera). Each is used to different expressive effect. 9th chords, 13th chords, major-minor clashes within (dirtiness/grit), eg. m. 3-6. Expanded tonality (IV - V - I) still there ... still possible to symbolize the chords, with lots of eg. Neapolitan 13th Fern Honey - Ragtime, including with rounded rhythm (no straight eighths), anticipatory - parallel harmonies - things move by step, tonic/dominant exists - sounds like violin improvising together with the piano Form: Intro, A. Theme, B. repeated theme with different ending, C. Contrasting middle section (new tune in L. hand of piano), D. Theme with B ending, E. Bridge, F. New material - like a 2nd Theme, G. repeated 2nd Theme (with intro), H. 2nd theme one more time: "goodbye!" Peter writes: Silken Rags is the name of the violin-piano duo I formed with my wife, Dorothea (Deede) Cook. It is also the title for an ongoing series of original works I have written or adapted for our duo. These pieces reflect our love of popular music of many kinds – ragtime, gospel music, tango, American popular song, Ghanaian highlife, etc. – and our attempt to capture the spirit and feeling of these styles within the medium of concert music for violin and piano. Blue Ridge Samba (2001) came to me as I was driving down the Blue Ridge Parkway on Thanksgiving day, 2001, on my way to a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. It was an "I miss you" message to Deede, whom I had to leave behind. Though very short, it tells a complete story, with a bitter little twist at the end. Le Tango Eternel (1985) began as a duet and dance number for Winston Clark's off-Broadway show, Berlin in Light. The inspiration here is the passionate, sexy music of Astor Piazzola. The opening lines of Winston's lyrics suggest the emotional flavor: "You know that that's a lie/ I didn't bite Yvette/ I never wanted her/ I only wanted you." Fern Honey (1972) subtitled "A Sentimental Rag," is the earliest of the “Silken Rags” pieces, written many years before I met Deede. It is an evocation of a romantic evening, its mood tempered by a note of sadness and regret toward the end. Though originally written for violin and piano, it later became a part of "Clarinet Bouquet” a set of pieces for Jack Kreiselman, one of the founding faculty of Stony Brook’s music department. [It takes its title from the name of the violinist for whom it was written].