ONE-TWO-THREE-GO!
Concert #5
Sunday, December 2, 2001 at 4:30 PM===================================================================================
EVAN ZIPORYN
solo clarinet & bass clarinetwith special guest
Todd Reynolds, violin===================================================================================
program:
Evan Ziporyn
Partial Truths
solo bass clarinetEvan Ziporyn
Four Impersonations:
1. Honshirabe
2. Pengrangrang Gede
3. Thum Nyatiti
4. Bindu Semara
solo clarinetTodd Reynolds
Beginner Mind
EZ and Todd ReynoldsEvan Ziporyn
Tight Fitting Garments
Don't Even Think About It
Jubilee of Indifference
EZ and Todd Reynolds
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From Lincoln Center to Balinese temples, from loft spaces to international festivals, composer/performer Evan Ziporyn has traveled the globe in search of new musical possibilities. His work is informed by his twenty-year involvement with Balinese gamelan, which has ranged from intensive study of traditional music to the creation of a series of groundbreaking works for gamelan and western instruments. His compositions for conventional forces have been performed by the Kronos Quartet, Bang On A Can, Nederlands Blazer Ensemble, master p'ipa-ist Wu Man, Maya Beiser and Steven Schick, Arden Trio, California EAR Unit, pianist Sarah Cahill, and Orkest de Volharding.
As a bass clarinetist, he has developed a distinctive set of extended techniques which he has used in his own solo works, as well as new works by Martin Bresnick, Michael Gordon, and David Lang. He has been associated with the Bang On A Can Festival since its founding in 1987, appearing as composer, soloist, and ensemble leader. As a member of the Bang On A Can All-stars, he has toured over a dozen countries and worked with composers such as Glenn Branca, Don Byron, Brett Dean, Nick Didkovsky, Arnold Dreyblatt, Steve Martland, Ralph Shapey, Tan Dun, Henry Threadgill, and Julia Wolfe. In addition to writing for the group and co-producing their most recent recordings, he has arranged works by Brian Eno, Hermeto Pascoal, and Kurt Cobain. He also regularly performs and records as a featured soloist with Steve Reich and Musicians. As a conductor, he has toured Europe with Germany's acclaimed Ensemble Modern and has recorded Michael Gordon's Weather with Ensemble Resonanz.
As a performer and recording artist, Ziporyn has worked with a range of master musicians from numerous musical cultures, including Paul Simon, Tan Dun, Wu Man, Maya Beiser and Steven Schick, Darius Brubeck, Todd Reynolds and Ethel, Sandhile Shange and Allen Kwela, Bob Moses, and Tony Scott. Venues have included New York's Lincoln Center, Amsterdam's Concertgebouw, London's Southbank Centre, and the Bali Arts Festival. His works are recorded on Cantaloupe, Sony Classical, Koch International, and New Tone. As a player, he has recorded for Nonesuch, Gramavision, New Albion, and Point Music. He is Professor of Music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Todd Reynolds is violinist and assistant conductor for Steve Reich and Musicians and The Walter Thompson Orchestra. He was a student of the late Jascha Heifetz, a student at the Eastman School of Music, former Principal Second Violin of the Rochester Philharmonic, and holds a Master's degree from SUNY at Stony Brook. As an improvisor and solo interpreter of new musics from classical to jazz and pop, Mr. Reynolds has appeared and/or recorded with such artists as Anthony Braxton, Uri Caine, John Cale, Steve Coleman, Joe Jackson, Dave Liebman, Graham Nash, Greg Osby, Steve Reich, Marcus Roberts, Wayne Shorter and Cassandra Wilson. In addition to his solo appearances at home and abroad, Mr. Reynolds appears as guest artist with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and is often featured as violin soloist and chamber musician with Bang On A Can.
Mr. Reynolds has premiered countless numbers of compositions by composers including Michael Gordon, John King, Steve Reich, Elliot Sharp, Julia Wolfe, and Randall Woolf, and recently appeared as soloist with Yo Yo Ma in Tan Dun's Water Passion after St. Matthew at the Barbican Center in London. He is a co-founder of Ethel, New York's hippest string quartet, and as composer/performer, Mr. Reynolds is currently developing Still Life With Mic, a theater piece which incorporates with his own composed and improvised music, elements of video and theater arts. He has recorded for Nonesuch, CRI, and Atlantic Records and can also be heard on Tan Dun's soundtrack for the film Fallen, starring Denzel Washington. On Broadway, he originated the role of "The Fiddler", playing and dancing on stage in the Tony Award-winning revival of Irving Berlin's Annie, Get Your Gun, starring Bernadette Peters and Reba McEntire.
Currently he tours as part of the Mahavishnu Project, a five-piece jazz-fusion band which centers around the music of John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra, performs often with The Betty Buckley Band, alongside Kenny Werner, Billy Drewes, Tony Marino, Jamey Haddad, and, of course, Ms. Buckley herself. Mr. Reynolds recently returned from a week of educational residencies in our nation's capitol with Yo Yo Ma's Silk Road Project, performing and teaching with composer Bright Sheng, ethnomusicologist Ted Levin, and Yo Yo Ma, culminating in a season opening performance at the Kennedy Center. Todd Reynolds is the recipient of an American Composer's Forum Grant for Still Life with Mic.
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Some Program Notes by the Composers:
Partial Truths is my longest work for solo bass clarinet to date, part of my ongoing efforts to reflect on my own relationship to my instrument, and thus to music making in general. The title is deliberately ambiguous, but refers at least in part to acoustical "partials" (overtones), in that the musical substance resides in the entire overtone spectrum rather than simply in the fundamentals. Melodies and harmonies rise out of the physical reality of the instrument, imply and insinuate, then merge back into the ether. It is dedicated to Arnold Dreyblatt. --- EZ
Four Impersonations: In Balinese trance, as in many similar traditions throughout the world, subjects are inhabited by specific people or entities who speak through them. Their voice remains their own, but the words they speak are foreign to them, often in ancient or foreign languages they themselves do not understand. In these pieces the voices of three different cultures - Japanese shakuhachi (Honshirabe), Balinese gamelan (Pengrangrang Gde and Bindu Semara), and East African nyatiti (Thum Nyatiti) - speak through the clarinet. As a rational westerner, I've transcribed and translated, found ways to play them, but as a trance subject-wannabe, I leave the interpretation to others. --- EZ
Beginner Mind comes from nothing and goes to nothing. The title is perhaps one of the most central of buddhist concepts, that of entering into every moment with the mind of one who knows nothing, and therefore experiencing more fully what is actually so before the moments of preconception. At it's best, it is the experience for both player and audience of notes and shapes appearing with a heightened sense of organic necessity. --- TR
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Notes from the Cantaloupe Music CD "This is Not a Clarinet":
This is Not a Clarinet is a recording, a record of some recent thoughts about the clarinet, as an instrument, as a cultural object, as an extension of myself, physically and metaphysically. As the title Partial Truths implies, its only claims to objectivity are incomplete and full of overtones; as "Impersonations" indicates, its subjectivity is both internal and artificial. The starting point for all the works are also double-edged: musically, they start with acoustics, with the idea that musical substance resides in the entire overtone spectrum (the "partials") rather than simply in the fundamentals; culturally, that the clarinet is an oral, folk instrument, whose function has always been to mediate between western and non-western music, between classical and non-classical idioms.
As for the impersonations, they are simply less abstracted versions: I transcribed these works carefully, and found extended playing techniques-microtonal fingerings, multiphonics, circular breathing, etc-to replicate them as closely as possible. Of course, the result, as with Lang and Tenzer, is not a replication but a newly discovered facet of the instrument and a path to new directions in my future work.
In my twenties I wrote clarinet music to express myself; in my thirties I wrote no clarinet music at all. Now I'm 41, I try to let the self-expression and the self-abnegation take care of themselves. Rather, I'm trying to look into and through the fundamentals, staring at and past the boundarys, trying to see what's there, what's on the other side, and what the connection might be. And trying to keep you posted as I go. --- EZ
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sTRANGEqUOTE:
"It is sTRANGE to see pop musician with sitars. I was confused at first. It has so little to do with our classical mUSIC. When he came to me, I didn't know what to think. But I found he really wanted to learn. I'd never thought our meeting would cause such an explosion that Indian music would suddenly appear on the pop scene. It's particuliar but, out of this, a dear interest grew."Ravi Shankar ---
on having George Harrison as a student
in a voice-over from an unreleased Apple film (1968)